Pro Patria Mori
by Sukkar
Summary: "There will be no reaping for the final Games. Twenty-four tributes, two from each district and two representing the Capitol, will compete. The search for these young men and women begins today - every contestant in the final Games will be entered voluntarily." These are the 90th Hunger Games, the grand finale.
1. Commencement

Commencement

x

Before we loose the word  
That bids new worlds to birth,  
Needs must we loosen first the sword  
Of Justice upon earth

'Justice', Rudyard Kipling

x

Cereus Gardner, District 11, Victor of the 79th Hunger Games

The announcement - publicized in generic terms, but broadly anticipated as the formal reveal of the finale, a year in advance - was set to be made in the Capitol's largest theater. Unsettlingly enough, this meant that the invitations summoned them to the same cavernous hall in which each of the victors had been crowned in years past.

Even if they weren't enveloped in a veritable tinderbox of some of the most volatile people in the country, Cereus would have been at least moderately uncomfortable with the setup. He'd never much enjoyed dressing up and being put on display, preferring, vastly, time spent in District 11, playing the part of field crew director over 'man, visibly uncomfortable, in fitted suit'.

His former mentee handled this sort of thing far better. Even Sharon, though, seated at his right, was visibly nervous as the minutes stretched on and the stage remained empty as the other victors around them exchanged quiet words and otherwise caught up.

Well, most of them were quiet.

"I don't see why _she _gets to skip it," Corsage, the youngest of three victors from District 1, was declaring at top volume. "_I_ have a job, too, you know."

"And we're all _so_ proud of you," Finish, the district's senior victor, replied flatly.

Sharon shot Cereus a nervous glance, and he shook his head. _For the love of all that's good, don't engage_. There'd be no productive discussion with the mood like this. He strained to make eye contact with Claudia, seated a row back beside the hulking blond Aaron - she seemed distracted, though, by something beyond whatever was about to happen onstage.

"Have we all made it?" Cereus asked, finally raising his voice.

Finish was the oldest of the victors present, followed by Neveah from District 4 and Claudia from District 2. It was generally Cereus and Claudia, though, who took the reins whenever the victors were expected to act as any kind of cohesive group. Between the two of them, they could generally wrangle the inner and outer district representatives into some kind of consensus.

"Seems so," Claudia agreed, after a long pause. "Cora won't be joining us, and I don't imagine Polly will, either, though she's more in your purview."

Cereus sighed grimly.

"My last interaction with her was several nights back. I can't be certain she's even in the Capitol."

"Nice," Sequin interjected. "Good to know the outer districts are as well in order as ever."

He bit his tongue, though Sharon looked like she might like to say something.

_Don't_, he reminded her with his expression.

Took another breath.

"Hey, he made _me_ show up, credit where credit's due," Saxaul, from District 7, interrupted, as he generally did. "Corsage was half an hour late, how's that for your _trainee district cohesion_? He slip his leash and get a few atrocities in before breakfast?"

Now it was Sequin's turn to scowl silently to avoid a fight.

"It's a poor time to be at each other's throats," Cereus said quietly.

"No time like the present!" Saxaul parried cheerfully. "There were mimosas at the breakfast buffet, it helps."

"_Saxaul_," he said warningly.

"I'll be serious," the younger man sighed. "Hell, I'll be so Cereus that I spontaneously grow a beard. Yours is looking good, by the way."

It would almost be more concerning if Saxaul _didn't_ show up to a gathering of victors spoiling for a fight, frankly.

So Cereus merely nodded, remaining silent, watching the stage intently. While there seemed to be little activity, under scrutiny, Peacekeepers and black-clad stage assistants formed a veritable hive of movement on the fringes of the spotlight-illuminated portion of the stage. District 11's mentors were seated together, towards the center of the area reserved for past victors - specifically invited for a front-row view. Sharon, beside him, was twitchy and on-guard, no doubt tired after rolling back into their suite so late, having received a hefty pile of invitations to various celebrations of the Games' return that he had turned down, but she felt obligated to attend.

She had aged since her victory in the 87th Games, six years earlier, though she'd only been seventeen at the time. Now himself in his thirties, Cereus still sometimes struggled not to see her as the child she'd been on that first evening on the train.

Despite her enduring it-girl status in the hiatus, which left the Capitol demanding far more of her time than his, she remained stubbornly unaltered, in contrast with Finish from District 1, who had rolled up to the announcement ceremony looking like he'd dipped his head in liquid gold, as was apparently the style now. He hosted some kind of inane talk show discussing, predictably, fashion, though Cereus was secure enough to admit that he'd seen a few episodes himself, and had sincerely enjoyed the parts that showcased craftspeople from District 1 and District 8. At least it was interesting once Finish was offscreen.

Though out of work during the three year delay prior to the announcement, they'd all managed to keep busy in one way or another. Sequin, the District 1-born victor of the 81st Games, had been placed in charge of some kind of cooperative technology-and-personnel exchange program between District 1, District 3, and District 8, which now churned out unified factory safety guidelines and appeared to have resulted in the invention of several new gemstones and a chemically modified form of nontoxic asbestos gear that could protect the wearer, ostensibly, even from immersion in molten steel, among other marvels.

Most were in television, because not everyone was the child of luxury mechanics, as Sequin was. Including Sharon, who had actually _married _in an intensely televised ceremony, one of the twenty-two suitors introduced to her on the outrageously popular competitive-dating reality show, Game of Love. Further reality series had been founded on her somehow-simultaneously-blissful-and-dramatic life in the Capitol with Leonin Devage.

Cereus, for his part, had returned home to his field crew when the hiatus was declared, grateful to devote his full attention to the district that he loved and hopeful that the apparent changes to the administration would mean something good for Eleven. His hopes had been surpassed. Two institutions of higher education, one for agricultural science and another for inter-district employment certification training and apprentice-matching, were in the construction phases. Pollinator enhancement projects, among other studies, had brought trains laden with young Capitol and District 6 scientists into the community, and their assimilation had not been the disaster that he'd feared, thanks in part to a campaign Mayor Jeffords had put together with his and Sharon's help.

For nearly three years, now, no children had died in the Games.

Things were changing. The world was expanding in unexpected ways. And the reprieve from the Games had no small part in the growing sense of prosperity, of safety.

He hoped the finale would mean just that.

The end. For good.

And this announcement would establish exactly _how_ that would happen.

Hence, the two rows of nervous victors in the cordoned-off area near the stage.

Who could blame any of them for being on-edge? The last time such a spectacle had gone on in anticipation of the Games, the fallout had wiped out the then-fifty-nine remaining victors, returning twenty-four of them to the arena. Only fourteen had been crowned since the reinstatement of the Games, the last being Cora of District 2, nowhere near the numbers they would need to mount any form of effective resistance if the worst came to worst.

Of course, Niagara from Five was long dead.

Cora's absence was also conspicuous. It was well known, at least among the victors, that she and Claudia, her former mentor, were eternally at odds. Which was strange, because Cereus found Cora to be a very pleasant and polite young woman, a little strange but well-meaning, and greatly enjoyed the three-year-running television show that tracked her professional development as a trauma nurse, now in training as a nurse practitioner, in a Capitol emergency room.

Broaching the issue would start a fight, so he didn't.

Cereus had no intention of upsetting Claudia, particularly not in the tense period before the finale's twist would be revealed. While he considered her a friend under any normal set of circumstances, this was not the time to test the limits of her goodwill.

He turned to Sharon, who was nervously tugging on one of her curls in the seat next to him, but before he could subtly inquire about any information she might have picked up at the series of pre-announcement parties she'd attended the previous night, the anthem began to play as the seal was projected in a massive hologram that swallowed up the stage.

The effect on the other victors - well, some of them - was immediate.

No one from the trainee districts seemed to react, but Timothy from Ten, behind him, flinched so dramatically that his knees hit the back of Cereus' seat. Saxaul, in the corner of his eye, grimaced.

And then, as the music faded, Cereus found himself abruptly looking into a massive projection of his own face. One by one, each of them was broadcast on candid camera, in a hologram that dissolved to reveal a composite image of all of the victors at their ceremonial crownings.

He frowned, thinking that he looked _younger _than he remembered looking in the immediate aftermath of his victory. Since then, he'd grown a beard, filled out his frame with coiled muscle beyond what could be achieved by a younger man whose childhood had been defined by malnourishment and fear of planes passing overhead in the Mockingjay Rebellion… he was practically unrecognizable. Twice as old, besides.

A voice boomed out over the crowd.

"Before we can begin, we honor, as always, the victors in attendance - and memorialize those no longer with us."

It was a familiar tone, and as he squinted through the hologram, he could make out the recently-ascended Master of Ceremonies, Lysima Vargas, an alumnus of The Games Network's interviewing staff, clip-clipping her way to the podium in her usual improbably high heels.

"Who's going to shoot me if she goes up there and says we're going back in the Games?" Saxaul asked, voicing aloud Cereus' concerns. "I've got a full bottle of tequila for whoever does it. I'll reveal the location with my dying breath."

"Act like a fucking adult, maybe, and kill your damn self," An, the only victor from District 6, replied tersely.

"Don't tempt me," he shot back.

Speculation had reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, based on cryptic but pervasive advertisement by the Gamemaking team, helmed by Herodotus Snow, a former executive at TGN, after the shocking death of Annia Neves in the debacle following the 89th Games. Cereus knew him as the solemn and businesslike coordinator of extra-Games media at TGN, so he suspected that someone else must be influencing the entirely melodramatic lead-up to the finale announcement.

Rumors had spiraled out of control. Were the living victors going to be executed live on air by the the customary twenty-two reaped tributes? Almost definitely not, but at least one magazine had raised the idea.

"Okay, can y'all be quiet?" Cereus demanded, as the hologram began to rise and contract to fit over the stage, projecting Lysima's face in a billion tiny fragments of pure light.

"Good evening," she began, smiling from behind the podium. "As Panem's Master of Ceremonies, it's my pleasure to welcome you tonight as President Lancaster makes the announcement regarding how exactly this coming year's Games - the grand finale, as it were - will proceed."

A coin hitting the floor would have been audible in the crowded amphitheater.

"My name is Lysima Vargas, and I'm honored to serve Panem as we bring the Hunger Games to their conclusion."

It was difficult, watching her, not to recall the fate of Head Gamemaker Neves, who had been similarly youthful-looking and lovely and put-together. Imprisoned on charges of treason and collusion, the glamorous Annia Neves had unglamorously slit her own wrists in a short-term holding facility prior to her trial.

If Herodotus Snow, seated, unsmiling, at the back of the stage, was concerned that this might be a poor indication for his own fate, he seemed to have no intention of letting it on.

"Not to mention, I think we've all been waiting for this with bated breath. I hope you've cleared your schedules for this summer, because I certainly have. The rumors are true. The grand finale will be exactly that - grand beyond our collective imaginations! May I now introduce... President Margaret Lancaster!"

The thunder of applause was less a function of the enthusiasm of the crowd than of its size. Whispers of speculation were ignited from the second the announcer finished her sentence.

"Thank you, Lysima," the President began, standing from her seat beside the Head Gamemaker and taking her place at the podium.

"God, she looks awful," Sharon whispered from beside Cereus.

Cereus was inclined to agree, but silently. President Lancaster had greyed, and not just her hair. Compared to the authentically youthful Lysima, well… she looked ill. Battered.

"I've been hard at work with my advisors and the remaining Gamemakers in search of a solution to our problem. Due to outside influences, the Games were warped into a tool that was never their intended purpose. Their fairness, their stand-in for the beautiful meritocracy of postrevolution Panem, was undermined by corruption. We recognize the loss of a cultural artifact, if not always the most widely beloved."

"Understatement."

Sharon nudged Cereus, and he shushed her. Not the time to be flippant. Sharon was young - too young to remember the time before. The bombs, the fires, the unending humiliations of life in District 11 before the Rebellion. He trusted Lancaster's intentions, whether or not he trusted her words.

He hoped that neither the victors nor his district would be the next casualties of the administration's reshuffling of the power structure. But it had to be for the best.

"Ultimately," the President continued, "I've become convinced that the problems that have arisen as a result of the Games are integral to their structure. I confirm, now, what much of the speculation has suggested; there will indeed be a finale, to draw a curtain on this part of our history and give closure to our country."

"That sounds promising," Cereus heard Timothy whispering to his companion - likely Saxaul.

_Don't sell your harvest before you've laid seed_, Cereus wanted to warn him. There could still be trouble. Having so many of the victors in the same place was always a gamble. Left them tactically vulnerable.

In a world where Richard Lorca could come a hair's breadth away from the Presidency, well… anything could happen.

"In this final round, we all participate as equals," the President announced.

The audience held its collective breath.

"There will be no reaping for the final Games. One year from now, twenty-four tributes, two from each district and two representing the Capitol, will compete. The search for these young men and women begins today - every contestant in the final Games will be entered _voluntarily_. Guidelines will be sent out to the office of each mayor, and in any district without a surviving victor as mentor, a stand-in will be chosem to supervise their volunteers as they prepare."

It was better than he could have hoped. No mayhem, no drastic upheaval - why, he could think of two members of his field crew of age to volunteer who'd likely be on board.

From the other side of the victors' partition, though, he could hear cursing - from the trainee districts, of course.

"Well, fuck _us_, then, I guess," Neveah from District 4 announced, barely audible behind the murmurs of the massive crowd but making no effort to disguise his frustration. "See if anyone wants to volunteer _this_ year."

Two volunteers - it seemed simple enough to Cereus, but he had no doubt that there would be trouble in other districts, where the selection of tributes worked differently, where the culture was different. And if the mayors' offices would be in charge of enforcement, well - that could mean anything, in districts with weak victor presence and no particular legacy of volunteer success. Polly in District 3 would be facing a losing battle against Mayor Rhodes, who preferred to use the Games to rid his district of potentially violent undesirables than to inspire pride.

But District 11 would be fine. That was what mattered.

x

Saxaul now had two attempts to stab Claudia under his belt.

All of this made meetings of the large group wildly uncomfortable.

"So, _what_," Corsage complained, after a fairly uneventful trek through the halls of the secure floor of the hotel. "We pick two volunteers? Same as every year except now everyone's doing it?"

"Yeah, it'll be a terrible struggle for you, I'm sure," An said, picking at a loose thread of the couch before seating herself in the District 1 victors' enormous suite.

"Actually, there may be trouble for us," Claudia sighed. "Our volunteers expect the competition to look a certain way, and I'm not putting anyone in the Games who doesn't want to be there."

"You're telling me," Neveah groaned. "It's hard _enough _to scrape together volunteers in Four, let alone competent ones."

"Putting it into the Mayors' hands is a surprising move," Cereus said, weighing in after a long period of deliberation. "I'll be curious to see what sort of guidance they receive. But in Eleven, at least, I have no doubt that Mayor Jeffords will ultimately defer back to me and Sharon."

"Well, we'll stick to the script in District One," Sequin declared, eyeing Corsage with the implication that they were in agreement, regardless of his thoughts on the matter. "We have two volunteers on track and they'll back out at their own peril. I'm going to consider this a year like any other."

"What about the Capitol tributes?" Sharon mused. "What happens with them? Are we calling them for trainees? Rich kids on a power trip? Lowest common denominator?"

"It's useless to speculate," Cereus insisted, calling attention back to himself. "I'm interested in hearing what each district will actually be doing, not hypotheticals. Eleven will send two authentic volunteers. I have a list of doors I'll be knocking on once we hit ground back at home. It's an honor, to compete in the last Games. That's what I'll be stressing. Our volunteers will be immortalized."

"That's a good angle," Claudia conceded. "Are we really going to have an arena of twenty-four sincere contenders? That doesn't sound like good television. That said, District Two plays to win."

"No doubt Mayor Rhodes will send in some pair of unfortunates he intends to get rid of," Sharon added. "Polly's never been able to get a leash on him."

"Once upon a time, _she_ was the unfortunate he wanted to get rid of," Cereus reminded her.

"Well, District Four is fucked - we've got inlanders who bow out at the first sign of a strong field and a few stragglers from the coast who barely pass their physicals. Maybe this is the year we finally just get rid of some rabble," Neveah sighed.

"District Six will send our best, but there's no guarantees," An said shortly. "Our best will _likely _be specialists. I'm sure that'll be the same for Five, if they can even scrape together anyone worth looking at. Not sure we have enough manual labor jobs to pull from, but I guess we'll see."

"Not _more_ poisoners?" Corsage groaned. "For fuck's sake, is that all you have? How does someone go out for a fucking drink in your shithole of a district, with all the fucking poison you all must be slinging around twenty-four-fucking-seven?"

"I said nothing about poisoning, _yet_. Watch your cup," An replied, a disturbing edge to her voice.

Corsage grimaced at her, but indeed took his glass of wine from the coffee table to more efficiently drain it of its contents.

"Mayor Jibril has a stick up his ass," Saxaul volunteered. "I wouldn't be _shocked_ to see him trying to use this as an opportunity to more explicitly clean up the streets of District Seven, though he could frame it as an honor just as easy and he'd probably be able to get some takers. But I'm not going to help him do it. Frankly, this is all bullshit. I actually plan to be very obstructive and unpleasant about this whole thing."

"You don't have to announce that," Claudia replied, a little coldly, Cereus thought. "We would have assumed."

There was a brief silence, accompanied by the general cognizance of the vacancies in District Eight and District Nine.

"I'd bet on no shortage of desperation volunteers from Eight," Claudia offered, tone entirely back to normal. "Things have been going from bad to worse in that hellscape since the election or lack thereof. And I haven't heard much about Nine, good or bad - they have plenty of muscle, but the lack of a mentor has been bogging them down."

"Wonder who they'll tap for the mentor stand-in role," Cereus sighed. "Could finally be their year."

"Can we agree that this seems like the year for big personalities? Just throw 'em in a jar and see what happens?" Finish, from District 1, finally weighed in.

"In theory, that's every year," Claudia replied. "But I agree about kicking it up to eleven. Go big or go home."

"I can't promise as 'big' as last time," Timothy grumbled. "But District Ten has some interesting characters worth turning up, and some of them should be eager to set the record straight after that train wreck."

"Hey, Samil wasn't your fault," Saxaul reassured him. "You did your best."

"Get a room, you two," Corsage scoffed.

"Get a _conscience_, you utter piece of shit," Saxaul shot back calmly.

"..._so_, the Capitol tributes, _anyway_," Sharon suggested, shifting the topic of conversation elsewhere. "Who do we reach out to about that? Are they gonna appoint some Capitol trainer to coach them? Octavion is miserable to work with, I hope it's not him."

"Claudia has the closest connect to the President, doesn't she?" Cereus pushed. "Can we count on you for that?"

Claudia shrugged. "I'll make a go at it, but if she doesn't want to tell me she won't tell me."

Cereus knew there was more to their relationship than that, but in front of all the other mentors, he opted to keep silent.

"Great chat," Neveah declared. "_Great_ to see you all. I'm out of here before someone pulls a knife."

He made his exit with startling alacrity, even for a victor still in relatively good shape in his early thirties, Cereus observed.

"This is our suite," Corsage announced. "You can all leave when you want."

Sequin looked prepared to swat her younger counterpart, but seemed to restrain herself with some effort.

"It's been a pleasure," she added - then turned to Corsage and began to tell him off, signalling to the rest of the group that the meeting was very much over.

"Claudia, Aaron, walk with us?" Cereus offered, rising along with Sharon and nodding towards the pair from District 2.

"Yes, let's," Claudia replied, and the four took their leave before anyone else could join them.

In the hall, Cereus let out the breath he always found himself holding in large groups of other victors. They could be exceedingly difficult, of course - it was how they'd won, being stubborn, resourceful, and self-interested, for the most part.

Claudia seemed to do the same, shaking her head as though to clear it of something tangible rather than just the stress of interacting with so many on-edge people so demonstrably capable of multiple murders.

At first, they walked in silence, Sharon and Aaron nodding at each other in their way of quiet acknowledgement.

"No Cora," Cereus finally commented. "Suppose it might be for the better that she wasn't part of that powderkeg."

The older victor from District 2 nearly laughed aloud, but stifled it.

"Oh, there likely would have been blood."

"You should have time to mend fences as we approach the finale?" Cereus suggested, watching her carefully. "A year to go, having put some distance between yourselves and the debacle with Lorca…"

"If only that were the problem," Claudia sighed. "It's fine. I know how she ticks. But it'll be a shame - Aaron's been pleasant company, and should we be brought back together for the finale I'll need to go back to sleeping with a loaded gun."

Cereus whistled softly. "That bad?"

"You have no idea."

"You'll communicate with me and Sharon, once you know more about the situation in the Capitol, though?" Cereus pressed.

"Of course. I think Finish was right, though - all we can do on our end is send the biggest personalities we can manage. Your Dasheen, this year - she would have been perfect."

"_If_ she could fight," Cereus replied grimly. "Maybe then she'd have made it through the first two hours."

"It was bad luck. I was sorry to see her go, though."

"Did you mean what you said - Two has its volunteers locked already?" Sharon piped in from where she walked behind the older pair, side by side with Aaron.

"Well, our girl, at least," Claudia sighed. "I'm starting to think we might try to send a specialist for our boy. Recruit from the mines or something to shake it up a little. Not set in stone just yet."

"Will Eleven _really_ just send another pair of laborers?" Aaron asked.

"Laborers with some personality," Cereus countered. "From my crew, or someone outside the circle with a real spark. Maybe even an orchard girl."

"I'm sure we'll get plenty of interest," Sharon added. "Everyone's going to be so relieved that the finale's not something worse. All that tension built up - she gave us an easy out."

"The districts are like a dog that's been hit too many times - they flinch whenever she raises her hand, no matter how many times she pours their food with it. She knows that," Claudia said.

"Do you think it's really over?" Sharon asked, expression somewhere approaching hopeful.

Cereus just sighed.

"Sharon, our parents thought it was over with the Mockingjay Rebellion. Then it wasn't. Once Lancaster proved the Games can be repackaged as the apple rather than the worm… it'll be at least another generation before the poison's out."

"And we don't all think they're poison," Claudia added lightly, reminding him that she, at least, was District 2 raised. "They go even deeper for us. The Center can shift to training Peacekeepers, but the Games are in our blood. They burned your fields in District Eleven - you were still farmers when the smoke cleared."

Cereus nodded, understanding - more or less. He'd worked with Claudia long enough to not be horrified by the way she thought. Even tracker jackers pollinated the orange groves, after all.

"Best of luck, Claudia. I'll be in touch once I know more about our volunteers. Please don't hesitate to do the same - especially if you manage to get the President's ear on this 'Capitol tribute' business."

"I'll be waiting for your call," the District 2 mentor said, sauntering away with Aaron in tow, leaving Sharon and Cereus alone by the elevator.

Though the floor on which the mentors had met was cordoned off, the elevator was fair game - on the ride down, Cereus and Sharon found themselves immediately beset upon by a gaggle of Capitol women staying at the hotel for a bachelorette party who took it upon themselves to recruit Cereus for their festivities.

"Those glittery multicolored freckles are the most benign alteration trend I've seen in years," Sharon commented, once the women were ushered out onto the floor that held the swimming pool with the magnetic-levitating bar.

"How would I look with some?" Cereus laughed. "I think some aqua blue sparkles on my nose would really make my eyes pop."

"Don't even joke, Finish looks ridiculous with his hair… what, coated in gold paint? He's bought in so heavy to Capitol culture, it's hard to watch. Like, he's thirty-four, time to act like an adult."

"Wise words from a twenty-three year old. He claims it's real gold."

"Even worse," Sharon sighed. "That bullshit could feed a family of four for a year."

"It's not our problem," he chided her. "As long as Eleven isn't starving for his gilded hairdo."

District 11 was doing many things, but starving was not one of them. In the aftermath of the morning's excitement, Cereus found his thoughts drifting back to home. He'd left Jessamine in charge of the field crew for his two-day absence. The lack of panicked calls meant that must have gone reasonably well. They were coordinating a new wetland-renewal rice paddy project with the help of a team of Capitol scientists, and the finale announcement had been inconveniently timed to coincide with the planned groundbreaking. He'd wanted to be there.

But it seemed like his team was functioning well enough without him.

Now to choose two young lives he'd be able to spare.

He put his head in his hands, abruptly exhausted at the thought.

"You doing okay?" Sharon asked, leaning in, concerned.

Cereus laughed harshly.

"I should be asking you," he admitted. "Christ, Sharon, I don't get into the Capitol to visit you nearly enough. Are _you _alright? How's the man treating you? Do I need to come by and put the fear of God in him?"

She laughed away his sincere concern.

"Leonin's fine, you know. Utterly terrified of you. Slightly terrified of me. Still dunno how they managed to get him on the show, even."

"Not falling in love with your reality television husband, then?" he sighed.

"C'mon, man," Sharon snorted. "Give me some credit."

They stood in silence for a long while upon reaching the door to Sharon's room. He had no intention of following her in, but didn't want to say goodbye so abruptly, either. It was always difficult to leave her alone, more so since all of those rumors about what had happened to Cora, and that was _while_ she was in her mentor's care.

"You going to see anyone else once I head home?" he asked, knowing that Sharon was closer than he was with most of the younger victors.

She smiled.

"A bunch of us have a weekly dinner. Well, Marina-sponsored. Trying to get us to see eye to eye, I figure. Anything you want me to pass along?"

"Can you work on Saxaul?" he suggested. "I'd prefer it if we could limit the stabbing, now that we know that we'll all be working together soon. Just, in the future. Twice is enough."

"Tensions have been getting high since he… well, he's doing something political, though he's being enigmatic about what. The Games coming up are definitely getting to him. He's not gonna like being told what to do."

"Well _I_ don't like attempted murders between victors."

"How about I subtly shame him for it? Like, super casual."

Cereus sighed.

"No, that won't work. I'm reasonably sure that man doesn't feel shame. Just - maybe he'll listen to someone if it's not me."

"He doesn't like _me _much better," Sharon admitted. "I'm working on it. Polly will probably be there too, she basically only leaves the house for the weekly dinner these days."

"She'll have to get used to mentoring again if Three's going to have even a seedling's chance on asphalt," he said grimly. "Who else will you see?"

"Depends on Cora's filming schedule and whether Timothy is technically sober this week," Sharon explained, glancing down at her wrist-mounted device as it hummed gently.

"Well, anything you can give me in terms of what to expect from our no-shows today… I mean, it's just one more Games."

"How bad can it be?" she laughed, then turned and rapped her fist against her own door. "Jeez, knock on wood, I'm going to jinx the hell out of us. Seems like things have gone fine so far."

"About as well as they can go," he agreed. "Let's keep the momentum going."

"Yeah, I'm gonna have to roll out soon, Leonin wants to make a dinner appearance somewhere," she said sadly. "It was really good to see you, Cereus. I know you'd put down literal roots in Eleven if you could manage it, but please don't be a stranger out here. Keep me up to date with the volunteer stuff, okay?"

"Of course," he said, accepting her hug and placing a comforting hand on her back. "You're always welcome home, too, you know."

She smiled up at him sadly.

"You know I can do a lot more for Eleven in the Capitol," she sighed. "Not that I wouldn't kill to be back at home working with you again. Can you stop by my house when you get the chance, actually? Last time I talked to my mom, she said Carla was acting up a bit. Maybe get her involved in field work if you think that'll help, but don't let her drop out, okay?"

Talking about her family, she looked a lot younger, glancing up at him with wide-eyed concern that reminded him far too much of the teenager he'd once been tasked with keeping alive.

Now she could more than manage that herself.

"I'll stop in and visit," he reassured her.

The Games hadn't destroyed either of them. And only… only one more. A finale. It would mean the end of this. No more young men and women plucked away from the fields and the classrooms when they were practically still green on the tree.

Well, not _no _more.

Two more. Two more volunteers.

He pressed a kiss to Sharon's forehead and turned to leave the hotel and catch his train home. Not wanting to jinx it.

But in a sense, she had been right.

How bad could it be?

x

_Welcome to the sequel to Memento Mori - yes, it's an open SYOT, and I hope you'll check out my profile to see the short character form if you're interested in being a part of it. You don't have to have read the 700k-ish prequel, but it might help make sense of the universe. I'll try to keep this accessible to people who haven't been with me on that particular #journey, but at the same time… you're joining an established universe, and it'll help both of us out if you know what you're getting into!_

_The deadline is April 6, and there will be more introductory chapters beforehand to properly set the stage. See my profile for more information. I really look forward to meeting your tributes! I'll post a few more intro chapters exploring The Vibe and then jump straight into intros. What will that look like? Who knows!_

_But if there's anything that I can promise you about me as a writer, it's that… I write, a lot, constantly, and update frequently and quickly. That, and I'm completely committed to doing right by every character that I accept. Hope to hear from and work with you all soon. :)_


	2. Offcuts

Offcuts

x

We know we are doomed,  
done for, damned, and still  
the light reaches us, falls  
on our shoulders even now

'Evening', Dorianne Laux

x

* * *

**The 76th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Finish Ardell, District 1**

* * *

He had always possessed a better-than-usual sense of the rules. Not necessarily in the way that makes a follower or a lapdog. But in the sense that he had a gift for divining exactly where the boundaries were and exactly how far he could push them without incurring consequences.

That, plus confidence, got him to the final two. For the first Games since the fateful Quarter Quell that ushered in the Mockingjay Rebellion, the Head Gamemaker has been playing it safe. He picked up on that from the start, from the arena, which seemed to be some kind of abandoned airfield. Having seen them on television, as had most of the other tributes, in the context of bombers and hovercrafts laden with soldiers, he had some idea where they were, and some additional idea of the militaristically-themed challenges they might face.

Many things exploded, but he was careful where he put his feet. Food was scarce, but District 1 had sponsors. His father had been killed when rebels took his home. He made a point of bringing that up a few times, staring out thoughtfully over the airfield, knowing the heartstrings it would pull.

His father had been kind of a dick - his mother certainly thought so - but he didn't bring that up.

The flashy girl from District 4 who had taken charge of their alliance died when mutts swarmed out of a menacing sewer grate. She would have been able to kill him in a fair fight, and likely would have, but between a well-placed kick to her knees and the horde of mutated rats, she died fairly easily. His district partner died when a little band of outer-district tributes tried their luck with the trainees. That was just bad fortune for her. Moissa was good company.

It felt _justified_, killing one, barricading the rest in the aging shell of a plane where they'd made camp and setting the thing on fire. It exploded spectacularly. Jet fuel. Nice.

Not as dumb as the blond hair would suggest, huh?

The only other person left alive could barely have been called that. She was tall and broad, probably a rebel, frankly, based on her answers in the interviews. Killing her felt justified as well, and he was beginning to find that he enjoyed that - feeling justified. Pecora Ramnath, the District 10 girl, put up a good fight.

He just happened to be a little stronger, in the end. Any of his allies could have killed her had they made it as far as he did, but they… well, they didn't. And there he was. Finish Ardell, the first post-Rebellion victor.

The Ten girl whispered something about carrying on the revolution as she died. He stabbed her a few extra times, even as the cannon rang out overhead.

In the post-coronation interview, he was asked why he did that.

"A rebel like her killed my father," he said, quite truthfully, averting his eyes.

But that wasn't why he did it. Watching the life fading from her eyes, he realized it was probably the last time for a good long time that he could stab someone and get away with it.

So why not enjoy it while he could?

He'd always had a knack, after all, for pushing boundaries _just _far enough.

* * *

**The 77th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Neveah Laurence, District 4**

* * *

In Panem-that-was, he likely would not have volunteered. District 4 was beginning to take disproportionate pride in their ability to select future victors fastidiously and to the highest standard. He'd never liked to sell himself short, but at the same time, that probably wouldn't have been him. Never took it seriously enough.

The people who believed that, who created the system that in turn created him, were all long dead by the time he reached the final two. The old ways died with them, the old trajectory of District 4 buried in scorched rubble and slowly being subsumed by the sea and the rot of intense, constant humidity.

He treated it like a joke from the beginning, because he'd never learned to treat anything any other way. Hard work didn't pay off the way people had always promised it would, back in District 4. So many victors, so much hard-won progress, all of it blown to hell because a few too many people had tried to pit their lot against the Capitol's. Wasn't that the biggest fucking joke of all?

Now he was the punchline, walking away from the typical volunteer alliance on the first day of training because they were, he felt, a bunch of incurable tightasses, allying instead with a few later-district guys who seemed of a similar mindset. It felt more like summer camp than anything once the bloodbath was done. Some kind of water park, all multicolored concrete and chlorinated pools he knew not to drink from by the smell alone.

They were a strong alliance, especially since the trainees, exactly as he'd predicted, made a fairly boring group themselves.

Hex from Three and Sabal from Eleven were good company until they weren't - one conveniently turned around and tried to stab him in the back, which was an idiot move, because Neveah could have snapped the boy's neck, frankly, if he didn't find killing with his bare hands distasteful. The other outlasted the terms of their alliance by a few minutes, loyal to the end. Both of them seemed to forget that, for all his laid-back approach, Neveah was a trainee, for fuck's sake.

To be fair, he was the only trainee to make it to the final four, let alone the final two. Maybe they had been right not to take the title seriously. Either way, it was him and some grim girl from District 9 named 'Babylon' of all things. Too stringy for a laborer.

He hadn't taken her seriously in training. And he was happy to engage in equally non-serious and one-sided taunts as she tried to take advantage of an ally-related injury to gut him with a modified _marine rescue hook_, of all things. Ha!

They dragged the fight out longer than it should have gone. By the end, they were both bleeding liberally and the massive wave-pool into which they'd been driven was clouded red with blood.

He drowned her in the end, which was oddly fitting, since one of his own sisters had drowned when they were children. It was as awful as he'd always imagined it must have been. Took such a long time.

But he won, after all.

A few weeks later, he was back to laughing things off. The alternative was sincerity, and after so long in its absence, the shock of exposure to something real might have stopped his heart.

* * *

**The 78th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Claudia Navarro, District 2**

* * *

She was born with blood on her hands. At least, that's what she'd been told. Delivered by a dead woman who had tried to hide her pregnancy on a long Peacekeeping tour of District 11. Maybe it was District 11. She's not totally certain. The Center adopted her, and then it consumed her, and then it spat her out into a revolution. Thirteen years old, too many notches on the butt of her gun to count. Rebel scum.

Frankly, she could take or leave the scum. There but for the grace of god went she, etcetera. Most of them weren't much older than she was.

But she learned, in the war, that she was _fond_ of war. And that there was another person in training with her last name, a little younger, who she'd never met. So perhaps she hadn't killed her mother after all. Perhaps she wasn't entirely alone in a world that had become so much bigger upon leaving the underground Training Center for the first time in years.

Once the Games were reinstated, she knew she'd have to get herself into them, somehow. It wasn't nearly as hard as she'd expected, still a very unregimented and confused process. The Center was left in disarray after half the leadership was wiped out - or, more optimistically, commissioned into political leadership. Not as though a trainee would be privy to staffing decisions.

She was the right choice for the Games.

In the final two, she found herself facing her former ally, a young man from District 4 on the heels of Neveah's triumph the previous year. He was aware that she'd killed _many _more people than he had. But of course, he didn't know the number any more than she did. She stopped keeping track half a decade prior. It was never really a joy.

Tomini was a handsome young man, and he took joy in _everything_. Thought it would be clever to strike off and leave the trainee alliance within the first few days, taking a page out of Neveah's book, though she learned from his partner that he'd been chasing after some late-district girl he'd found captivating. Well, good plan - she killed the rest of the trainees quickly when they reached the final ten. He would have been among the dead if he'd stuck around. No one expected it of her. All business. Nothing personal about it. Four allies, four throats, four cannons, that simple.

All her life she'd seen people trip up by making things too personal. So she didn't repeat the mistake.

Running off like a coward seemed to have served Tomini well enough, since he made it to the final two, but she was determined to win on her own terms, to vault straight from victory to the future she envisioned, a glorious one… just one person remained in her way.

He really didn't stand a chance. A creative enough opponent, but badly injured from his time wandering in the iced-over dilapidated cityscape, which had concealed a variety of vicious mutts. The massive white bears, in particular, had mauled him thoroughly in the process of devouring the district girl he found so infatuating.

People typically used the final fight to take some kind of stand, make a point, go out in a blaze of glory. She knew it was expected of them - so did Tomini.

But all she had to ask was what had happened to Saye, his District-8-sweetheart, and that was it. He did most of the work for her. Hurled insults along with clumsy spear-thrusts, nothing she couldn't handle easily with a short sword and a clear head.

It was cruel to drag it out, she knew, but that was just how things were done. She told him what a shame it was that he had joined her in the final two instead of Saye - perhaps _she_ would have won the fight, hadn't she been a little more talented than he was? - and then eviscerated him.

Unkindness had never really brought her joy, but neither had anything but victory. Winning wars, winning Games. She resolved to do more of each before she died, and she smiled for the entirety of the hovercraft ride home.

* * *

**The 79th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Cereus Gardner, District 11**

* * *

He wasn't the first late-district volunteer, but he became the archetype of one. Eighteen, a few minutes away from being free of the reaping forever. But the boy selected looked so young, so hopeless. There were a million reasons, and there were no reasons.

Before he said the words, he threw up his hand and shouted 'wait!', though he never thought of applying his own advice to himself.

And that was it. He was in.

Hubris, or perfectly rational confidence? It was a thin line.

His district partner planned to join him in facing the arena. They were going to make a break for it together, just cut and run from the Cornucopia. Magnolia was younger, but level-headed, accustomed to hard work, and, pivotally, she was with him on what District 11 should represent, how important it was that they be seen for what they really were. Times were different. They had come a long way since the Mockingjay Rebellion. Cereus didn't bear the scars of the Peacekeepers' whips, but his older sister did.

Then she was killed almost immediately. The District 4 girl, with a makeshift spear, in the food court of a massive shopping mall where the Cornucopia jutted from the tile floor. She caught him in the side with a second volley, but he shook it off and ran. By a stroke of luck, he found himself in a nursery stocked with all varieties of plants, some kind of garden shop, slightly overgrown but all of it still usable. He armed himself with a shovel, treated his wounds, fed himself, and waited.

He didn't have to wait long for others to get hungry, the food court largely controlled by the fractious trainee alliance. Most turned tail and ran before getting more than a good look at him, one of them having the utter nerve to knock over a few young tomato plants on the way out. In some ways, the intimidation factor was a godsend. He'd never been the type to seek out a fight, and was determined not to make something terrible of himself, even in the arena.

For District 11, and for Magnolia, too, he would set an example worth following.

A sensible older girl from District 8 struck up a sort of tenuous alliance with him - she looked out for his storefront from her camp in a mannequin display across the hall, with an alarm she could trigger to cause confusion if anyone got too close. He brought her fresh vegetables and swore that at her signal, he'd come running to her aid.

Cereus was nothing if not a man of his word. He meant to keep his promise. And he did, when she finally sounded the alarm - only to find her near-dead by the time he made it out, a torn-up pincushion of the District 4 girl's makeshift spears, from the shafts of wooden mops and brooms.

That was how he learned that the trainee alliance was over, that the Four girl, Scilla, had done something to make it all fall apart, and that the smoke had cleared to find only her and the One girl, Ceramic, alive. It was the two of them who'd flushed out his sort-of-friend.

He didn't cry over her. That wouldn't have been appropriate. But he took the spars of splintered wood from her body, dressed her in fresh clothing from the abundant options on display, and as soon as he looked away, she'd been vanished into the tiles beneath her as if by magic.

And that was that. Now he had a mission, didn't he? In theory, at least. He turned off the alarm and waited, returned to the nursery, and set up, as best he could, a fresh tripwire to alert him when the trainees returned, as he knew they would.

They had taken the Eight girl's vegetables, the ones he'd carried over just that morning, so they must have suspected something to do with the plant shop.

Oddly enough, it was a different pack of competitors who made his life difficult first. A sort of rival band had sprung up in training, the surviving pair from Six and the pair from Nine, of whom only the boy remained. They'd led the two trainees to his friend across the cavernous hallway, and now that her ability to warn him of their arrival was gone, they had a mind to take him out in his sleep.

They certainly tried.

His lack of kills so far in the Games was not the indication of weakness they seemed to think it was. Three scrawny outer-district types against one of him, asleep or not? Hardly a fair fight. While he didn't emerge fully unscathed - in fact, the modified clothing hanger the first girl had stabbed him with would remain in his chest, holding a web of blood vessels together, until the end - he walked away from the ambush.

That much couldn't be said for any of the three assailants.

He spent the rest of the day cleaning up the nursery. The cement floor was scrubbed of blood and tissue by the time the trainees arrived. He was waiting for them, shovel in hand.

Scilla seemed almost surprised that he was still alive. No one immediately struck first. He'd tidied up the nursery, of course, but he couldn't hide the fact that he'd recently been in combat, the three cannons they surely must have heard in quick succession.

Even thinned out, their food-court reserves not having lasted all that long, the two trainees put up far more of a fight than the stragglers from earlier. It ended abruptly when he caved in Ceramic's skull with his shovel. Rather than fight on, Scilla ran.

He was left to clean his wounds, wash away yet more blood, and water his tomatoes.

Waiting, again.

It was almost the final two, and she'd have to come back eventually, or else the Gamemakers would have to flush him out. The former proved to be the case, as Scilla reappeared one night after somehow setting most of the arena on fire. Emergency sprinklers on, red emergency lights illuminating the steaming nursery, the flicker of flames just barely held at bay… it was a wildly disorienting final fight.

She got to his shovel before he did, smashed the thing since it was too heavy for her to wield. Kept her distance, having learned better than to get in range of his fists. One makeshift spear to his stomach. Another grazed his neck, spilling blood down his shirt. A third rendering his left arm near-useless, a fourth lodged between his ribs, not quite deep enough to puncture his lung.

That was the one he ripped out of his own body and used to kill her.

Over and over again, the trainee districts killed and burned and savaged the rest of them, only to be rewarded for it. Was it worth it, then, to be crowned on the same stage as the victors who had come before him? To add his name and his district to the ranks of One, Two, and Four?

Yes.

Of course it was. The world was changing, and Eleven would have to change too.

He knew that, if nothing else, with complete certainty. And now, as a victor, he had the tools to help them do it.

* * *

**The 80th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Sequin Singson, District 1**

* * *

The eightieth Games were the last that really went the way they were supposed to go, or so most of the trainee mentors had always been convinced. Sequin was an excellent volunteer. She worked hard, had something to prove in a room full of trainees whose parents could buy and sell hers, had they cared about her enough to try.

When she volunteered, it truly was _her year_.

She'd earned it. Every bit of it.

Faience, her partner, was one of those talented-but-oh-so-vacant types who'd never really struggled for anything more than a sixty-third pull-up on assessment day. She was fond of him, though, and they made a good match, since he managed to muster up some respect for her situation, and she for his. His stories of overbearing parents made her look at her own mother and father with more gratitude than she'd thought possible, whether or not they were home often - they made time for her, never raised a hand to her, never let her feel worthless.

So when they saw the arena, it seemed obvious how things were going to play out. Sequin knew cars. It was one of the few things she'd ever done with her parents, her happiest memories streaked black with oil. The deserted strip of highway, raised hundreds of feet above a yawning precipice to either side, littered with abandoned vehicles, might as well have been designed for her specifically.

Even Faience knew it, though they kept it hidden from their allies. Cimber from Two was their biggest competition, even after Faience handled his partner, Olivia, in the bloodbath… easy enough to kneecap her and push her over the edge of the arena to test what kind of force field it was.

Not one of the friendly toss-you-back-all-gentle-like kinds, it turned out.

There wasn't a force field at all. Just jagged rocks, a few hundred feet below.

So it was them, the pair from Four - a girl who was clearly _very_ into it, a boy who wasn't - and the grieving ten-scoring golden boy whose ally they'd already knocked off, literally. Perhaps not the dream team, but not bad, either.

They set about paring down the population of the arena with all the efficiency expected of the trainee alliance, challenged at intervals by overgrown vulture mutts, periodic stampedes of massive cowlike creatures larger than the broken-down cars which came like clockwork when the sun was at its peak overhead, and small legions of squirrel mutts that inhabited the strips of trees to either side of the highway before the steep drop.

The crush of mutts claimed the life of the Four boy when he struggled to get into the car they chose for shelter. Sequin surreptitiously locked the door from the inside, so that couldn't have helped.

It should have been her and Faience in the end, she was certain of it, but the nature of the arena intervened. She had been holding back on her ability with the cars, not wanting to confer too much of an advantage to her formidable allies.

The allied pair from District 3, it turned out, had no such reservations. They had made camp in the fringes of the forested area adjacent to the highway; the Three pair ran them down in the middle of the night, headlights blazing, and Faience was the unlucky casualty.

After that, she pulled herself together fairly quickly; it was on her, now. She made a great show of digging up a bundle of wire she'd retrieved from the Cornucopia and declaring that with it, she could do what the Threes had done, after all. Cimber bought that well enough, more because she was, presumably, as messed-up as he still managed to be over his ally's death.

She wasn't.

In fact, she fiddled with the engine of the car she rendered operational for his use such that he died, too, in a fiery explosion. With hers, she hunted down the Threes, taking out a straggler on her way. Floored it and killed one of them in the crash.

The other, she wanted to make just a little more personal. For Faience, who shouldn't have died like that, never deserved that kind of ignoble end. So the other Three, whose name she never bothered to learn, found herself sliced to ribbons at the tip of Sequin's sword.

She was a mechanic second, a trainee first, after all.

And then, she was District 1's second victor, making them the first district to bring home more than one. The respect she'd earned was everything, and she had no intention of giving back a fraction of her dignity, once she'd clawed her way to personhood, hand over hand.

It didn't last forever, but in the days after her victory, it felt like it could.

* * *

**The 81st Hunger Games**

**Victor: Polly Matzeliger, District 3**

* * *

She'd never been a great student in the ways that mattered. Talented, sure, but too inclined to talk back and too disinclined to follow directions, excessively fond of her own world, her own ideas. Talent mattered in District 3, but not enough to keep her out of trouble.

No one was especially surprised when she fell in with the wrong crowd. It fit the stereotype, the few remaining dregs of the rebel element in District 3 preying on clever school-age outcasts in an effort to claw back power. Mayor Rhodes was always speaking on the importance of flushing such delinquents out.

Most of them were kids her own age, though, and she got to mess with lasers, and it was rewarding enough until the 'jail' part, and then the 'being reaped' part. Which was a shame, because she didn't mind solitary all that much, so long as she had the opportunity to tinker. And she did, under strict supervision. None of that in the arena.

A shame.

She didn't expect to make it past the first day, not after treading on so many toes in training. Lucien Navarro, from Two, allegedly had his sister as a mentor. Someone mentioned as much at the snare-building station, where she was toying with the materials that had kept her predecessors in District 3 alive, wishing for the opportunity to steal a holo-tablet or literally any other piece of equipment worth using.

"Well, hope she taught him how to use a sword, since he seems basically as smart as one," she said carelessly, which should have been the kind of funny throwaway line that made people laugh uncomfortably and recognize that she would be mean as hell if she wanted. But someone _heard,_ and that someone passed on the commentary, and then _he_ was gunning for _her_, of all things, _her_ \- and, well, it was just too idiotic not to comment on it further, right? This square-jawed trainee boy who could probably punch through steel, so bizarrely threatened by her reedy self?

Her interview was one for the history books.

Combined with her generally standoffish affect, and the fact that she sincerely would have preferred death over 'making new friends' in this sort of environment, things looked fairly grim, though at least she felt confident that she would die with the last word.

And then, at some kind of dilapidated beach resort, with fading red shutters on sunken-roofed wooden cottages, greyed out by proximity to the sea, she survived the bloodbath, escaped into a sort of mangrove forest on the fringes and kept her distance for as long as she could.

Not long. Outer-district stragglers kept stumbling into her, and she knew it was only a matter of time before they sent Lucien her way, gave him the chance to finish her off, likely, show the might of the early districts once again, just as they had so many times before.

She was forced to fight for her life a few times, but never in a way she couldn't manage, outsmarting a hoard of click-clicking red crabs that descended from the trees in which she sheltered, running for the ocean rather than the beach. The other tribute sheltering in the forest, with whom she'd made an uneasy truce, the girl from District 6, wasn't quite so clever. The crabs were held at bay by the crashing surf, but also by the smell of blood as they devoured her body beneath an undulating sea of blood-red carapieces.

That was interesting. The fluid dynamics of a swarm of mutts. She wished she'd brought her sketchbook.

For the next few days, she tested the limits of the tree-crabs. How far they would chase her down the beach, how deep into the water they could go when deprived of food, growing hungrier and more aggressive by the day after skeletonizing that unfortunate girl. She created a system of irrigation ditches, slowly, that allowed her to sleep safely at night.

Meanwhile, the trainees did what the trainees always did, sticking mainly to the resort village, which had the benefit of shelter from a few overgrown seahawks that posed a real threat to anyone thinking to make camp without a roof or a canopy overhead. Polly coexisted with the crab-mutts, which kept her safe from the potential for death-from-above.

A loner from Nine tried to take her setup. She only had to cut him once and follow her much-practiced plan to avoid the flood of crabs that ensued, and that problem was eliminated. In high tide, at least, with her ditches overflowing, her setup was impenetrable.

Lucien wasn't as stupid as she'd speculated. Eventually, the trainees having been thinned out by the many mutts, and, she later learned, his complete willingness to kill his own allies, she faced off with him. Low tide. He'd been waiting for it.

It wasn't her and Lucien in the final two, as she'd worried. In some ways, the final three was worse. The only other competitor left alive was some thirteen year old who'd been particularly adept at hiding, a little girl from Five who had grown up on the riverbanks, who'd outlasted more floods in her day than the arena could throw at them. Solana off hiding somewhere, Lucien and Polly facing off on the deserted beach.

What an odd final three. Even she was cognizant of the strangeness of the year… a villain, a loner, and a little girl. She had no idea how anyone running the show _wanted_ anything to go. It felt like a free-for-all. No rules.

She loosed the mutts, slicing her own bicep to wet the sand with blood and bring them into the frey. Soon, there was far more than just a few drops of blood running down her arm. Lucien was a devastatingly talented fighter, and she was armed with a spar of driftwood that had splintered into unusability with his first blow.

Had he not been toying with her, she would have been dead in twenty seconds, even with the sea of little red crabs slicing up their ankles.

So how did she survive?

She could never be completely sure, despite mentally going back to the moment many times over her quiet years as victor. He lost his footing in one of her trenches, which had been deepened and rendered unstable by recent rainfall. The crabs swarmed. She watched. He screamed.

It took an appropriately long time for him to die. She didn't have any intention of expediting the process. Blood ran through the trench, and the surf was stained with it by the time his cannon sounded. Mysteriously, the kill was credited to her and not to the Gamemakers, though she never so much as touched him.

And then it was her and little Solana.

Here, as well, the Gamemakers had her back. They flushed the little girl out of hiding at last by toppling the broken-down beach houses under which she'd been hiding, sent her fleeing Polly's way with sand agitated so that it seemed to take on the properties of a liquid.

Polly won the Games by unhesitatingly killing a terrified child. An armed child, of course, Solana had a knife. But that didn't make it any less…

She'd done things most people would struggle to comprehend. Been a party to horrific mutilations in the last few days alone. But somehow, swinging the spar of driftwood at the little girl was the worst of it. Somehow, it worked. She was a delicate little kid, after all, not the best fed. Twitched a lot.

What was she supposed to do?

There was no beautiful principle behind this death, nothing worth understanding but the sound a person's temple makes as it fractures. How could she live with this? What kind of person was she, that… all this… all this and they didn't even have the presence of mind to put her back in jail. Where she surely belonged.

If she could kill a child like that, she could do anything, and so she did.

And now the pods beneath the Capitol hummed with a power she had given them, with Claudia and Mayor Rhodes to twist her arm, yes. But no one had twisted her arm when she killed Solana. She found it hard to believe that a painless genocide could be any _worse_. But she also found it hard to get out of bed most mornings.

There was some sense to be made of all that, she supposed.

* * *

**The 82nd Hunger Games**

**Victor: Niagara Banerjee, District 5**

* * *

A normal-ish girl had won the previous year, so she didn't _not _have a chance, right?

Barely fifteen, though. Long odds, even she had to concede that much. Not stupid, though, and utterly unwilling to count herself out. The trainees were more wary of a mouthy district girl than they had the year previously, after Polly's victory. She found that part delightful.

The youngest of eight siblings, she'd been around the block a bit when it came to getting attention. Walked into training ready to start a fight. Found one immediately; the District 4 girl, Moira, had been reaped with no volunteer to take her place. The trainees were refusing to take her, the poor idiot, barely sixteen and just not able to commit to the kinds of things that the more serious volunteers from One and Two were asking of her.

So it was her and Moira, and then Kune, a wisecracking blond from District 10 who eschewed traditional ideas of gender. It was a fragile alliance, as interdistrict groups tended to be, but they all liked each other by the end of pre-Games, at least a little.

It ended quickly in the bloodbath. The trainees weren't ready to see the events of the past year repeat, and made a point of going after them, as they should have expected. Killed Kune - overkill, really, they were a slip of a thing, no one needed to be stabbed that many times. Nearly killed Niagara.

The dropoff point, though, was next to a massive lake in the middle of a desert, and Moira managed not only to kill her own district partner, but to drag her half-dead ally through the water, billowing blood behind them, a sufficient distance to take some time to recover and heal before the trainees, constrained by land travel, caught up with them.

Once Niagara was back on her feet, she was ready to be proactive again, but Moira wasn't. She was determined, in fact, not to kill anyone else, after the horror of her own partner's blood on her hands. Reluctantly, Niagara yielded to her ally, though most of her compunctions about killing trainees had evaporated after what she'd seen with Kune.

Moira had saved her, and that didn't count for nothing. They fought mutts instead of trainees, for the most part, exploring the desert and relying largely on their sponsors for water. If Niagara could do anything she could hold sponsor attention, especially with someone like Moira to bounce off of - she ribbed her ally mercilessly about her mentor, Neveah, knowing that the crowds would find that sort of talk hilarious, kept their feud with the trainees alive for the audience even as they evaded the hunting parties day after day.

And they didn't do too badly with the mutts, either, combatting, at one point, a thirty-foot snake with a massive… hood?... which proved to be wildly venomous. The fangs, not the hood. Niagara broke one off as a keepsake as they defeated the mutt with their hard-earned knowledge of the terrain, luring it into a narrow cave near the oasis and hacking their way through the long vertebral column when it lodged itself inside.

All the while, Niagara found herself, almost unwillingly, becoming attached to her ally. From District 4, of all places. Moira could give as good as she got, but chose not to, seemingly still grateful to Niagara for initially reaching out in friendship, even though she'd saved her so many times since then, kept her alive even at the expense of her loyalty to her district of birth.

It was admirable, in a way, how Moira could grow to trust someone so quickly. She wanted to deserve that trust. And more often than not, she found herself holding her tongue, trying to make the girl smile rather than going for the cheap laugh, as had always been her impulse.

They had to confront the trainees eventually, though they'd been winnowed down, by the final eight, to the allied pair from Two and the boy from One. Niagara was determined not to force Moira to fight for her again. She spent the better part of the day on a trap, submerging sharp spars of wood retrieved from the thorny trees of a brush forest they encountered, preparing for what she knew was coming.

She hoped Moira wouldn't watch, whether she died or became a killer. Tried to send her away, since it would be for the better, wouldn't it? Final eight?

But no, her ally stayed stubbornly by her side, and together they killed two trainees that evening. One with the serpent mutt's fang in her heart, the other stumbled into the trap, who Niagara tracked down as his blood seized the sand. One more to go. The smarter of the pair from Two, Viben, a boy who'd never seemed as rattled by Niagara's taunts as his partner.

They met him again, after a few more nights, these spent shivering together as the temperature dropped. At least one person simply froze to death. Moira and Niagara held on. The lake, when they returned to it, out of water and short on further sponsors, had dried up to an icy puddle.

Viben showed up for the last of the water, as did their long-dead ally's district partner, Xuyen, an imposing young woman who'd showed next to no interest in them during training. Now, though, she was willing to side with them against the formidable threat posed by the last trainee. Neither Viben nor Xuyen made it out of the fight alive. Niagara found herself, once again, badly injured.

Moira, who had held back, was as healthy as a person could be after three weeks in the desert.

She waited for her ally to finish her off.

Instead, Moira helped her back to her feet, bandaged her wounds, seemed not to hear her as she insisted that people in the final two just weren't allowed to do this, didn't Moira understand? How could she not see that the Games wouldn't be allowed to be a love story, no matter what kind of love was on display?

Where they failed to kill each other, the arena intervened. After a night in each others' arms, the sand came alive as the sun rose. It was not how she'd expected to die, in an unwinnable fight against the desert. They held out as long as they could.

Then Niagara, worse off to begin with, felt her strength beginning to flag.

Moira saw it too.

Driven to the edge of the rocky cliff where they'd killed the snake mutt together, Moira kissed her forehead and jumped as a wave of sand bore down on them.

She spent the rest of her short life as victor trying to deserve the devotion that Moira had offered her. Befriended the wrong people, fought for the wrong causes, and died for it. The lost victor from District 5. From the moment she met that girl, Games or not, she didn't have a chance.

* * *

**The 83rd Hunger Games**

**Victor: An Akimoto, District 6**

* * *

Fairly earned, a training score of three had previously been little more than a death sentence. An wasn't stupid, but she was no District-3-brainiac, either. Just resented the whole thing so thoroughly. The Games were never supposed to happen to someone like her. Her parents gave to charity, for the love of goodness!

To top it all off, she wasn't much of anything. A decent student. A perfectly fine friend, though only her mother had wept over her during their goodbyes.

She was exceptional in one respect: intense, unyielding, directionless anger.

By luck as much as by any of her own skill, she made it over the black ice stretching between herself and the Cornucopia without falling. Grabbed what she could. A blanket - critical. A satchel of protein bars. And a backpack, which seemed promising even though the weight of it nearly kept her from making her escape.

It was loaded, though, with nothing but a massive container of strychnine. _Strychnine_?

She couldn't very well eat _that_. Couldn't burn it for warmth. But she lurked near the trainees' camp, as the best water source, a warm mountain spring that sent a crystalline river snaking through the icy forest, was tightly under their control. And she found a way to make use of the poison, and killed three off the bat, cut the throat of a fourth who was clever enough to force herself to vomit with a knife liberated from a still-twitching body.

Not too bad for the little girl with a three.

Most people don't remember that she killed more than those four, though. The pair from Three, after drinking downstream of the slaughter, took ill, but not ill enough to die. Not until she'd joined them, briefly, in an alliance. Cut short by the same knife.

It was a kindness, after all. She knew better than anyone how terrible a death by strychnine could be. A kindness, relatively. They went fast. Their tremors stilled along with their cannons' blasts.

Only the fifth day, and half the deaths were to her name. An avalanche left a straggler from District 5 helpless, both legs broken, struggling to draw breath from a chest framed by shattered ribs. She gave up on the pretense, at this point. Didn't know his name and couldn't find it in her to care. One more down.

Killing didn't make her feel any better, of course, but that was part of the agony of it - waiting for guilt or shame or regret to replace the burning. Only growing hotter.

The girl from District 8 saw her brightly-colored jacket from a distance, offered her an alliance after they were driven together by a herd of massive deer with thorny, jagged growths in place of antlers. An was injured in the stampede, had her leg sliced open, narrowly survived a near-goring.

So she waited a day before she killed Moire, more to recover and sleep with a guard than out of any particular affection. This one wasn't a bloodless kill like the others. Moire, after all, had killed on her own by then, wasn't poisoned, put up a fight. A lighter sleeper than she'd bargained for. Still lost, though. Still died.

By the time she reached the final two, she'd already killed more people than any tribute since the Mockingjay Rebellion, dethroning District 2's Claudia Navarro.

Fittingly, her final competition was her own district partner.

Gavin hadn't paid a second's attention to her in training. He'd acted as though she didn't have a chance. Like everyone else. Him and his stupid seven, so proud of it. Asshole. Clearly, he knew something was different about her. It wasn't just Moire's blood - they were both covered in blood.

Maybe you walk a little different with eight murders under your belt.

He was injured about as badly as she was from his last confrontation, the abrupt conclusion of his alliance with the girl from District 10. Perhaps a little worse off.

That wasn't what decided the fight, though.

An didn't like to admit it, but she'd always had a bit of a melodramatic streak. She didn't know much about strychnine, but she knew she was fond of it, by then.

She'd saved a little just for him, on the blade of her knife, wetted with Moire's blood.

It wasn't as long of a fight as they must have been expecting. She didn't let him writhe and spasm for too long. That would have been excessive. Finished things with all her weight behind the knife. Right through his eye.

They didn't know what to think of her back home. Most people, including her family, though they took the money, lived in the house, of course they did… most of them just wanted to move on, to forget it.

She didn't mind all that much. To her, the Games seemed to have laid the fabric of Panem quite bare. Not a kind place, not a fair one.

The sort of world where a person like her could win.

Who would want to embrace an awful truth like that?

* * *

**The 84th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Saxaul Eslami, District 7**

* * *

He could list the reasons for volunteering. Number one, he was hungry, literally. A dead dad and a flipped-out mom, and him as the eldest of four, still just a smidge too young to pick up the kind of work that garnered decent pay. Number two, dear fucking god, he was going to lose his mind if he had to spend another goddamned day in District 7, if he had to hear another goddamned person call him 'Syca', which was _not his name_.

So out he got. The one way out. And he volunteered as Saxaul, and christened himself in the deluge of attention and options and - god, there was a whole world beyond the fence, and he just wanted to see all of it! Be part of _everything_! Do something worth doing, even make someone proud, maybe, actually make the world a little better someday instead of slogging around in some paper mill for the rest of his life.

The Games were a rude and abrupt awakening to reality: there would be no pride for him there.

Just as well, not like he left any of that behind at home or, god forbid, tried to carry it along with him. They told him to play, and he played along. Found himself to be quite the actor. Killed a trainee in the bloodbath, on the way out with his district partner, barely-fourteen Jacara. Not a massive accomplishment. Someone had left an arrow in her, it was more a finishing of the job. But there went the girl from District 2, who had been a favorite to win in pre-Games, and just like that, he was a contender.

He turned seventeen in the Games, had been counting down the days. They celebrated with the last of their food, by a little fire to beat back the cold as the tundra iced over. That night, Jacara, who had made things tolerable at first, for whose sake he'd been able to excuse the rising guilt of what he'd been made a part of, tried to kill him in his sleep.

So that was two dead people, then. This one scooped up by the hovercraft with still-cooling tears in her eyes from insisting that he should have volunteered for _her_ if he wanted to die so badly. How could he? How _could_ he?

As points go, it was not a high one for him.

That particular abject suffering earned him a brief reprieve as, elsewhere in the arena, the population was winnowed down as the steeply falling temperatures brought a strong late-district alliance into a clash with the trainees that left the two survivors badly injured. He could take the mutts they sent his way, a freakishly overgrown dappled grey-white fox, a flock of owls with razor-sharp talons.

Before they drove him back into conflict with the other tributes, they tried to shoehorn him into another alliance. He was willing to have exactly none of it. Khazal, a lanky butcher's assistant from Ten, had his jacket shredded by the owls. Was prepared to _beg_ to share his bedroll for the night as temperatures plummeted below zero.

The turnover time from 'feeling the undisclosed knife in the young man's pocket' to 'cutting his throat' alarmed even Saxaul. This time, though, he was determined to stab first and ask questions later. Couldn't take another antemortem conversation like the last one. Just _couldn't_.

It came down to him, Linalool from District 1, and a young man named Danh from District 9. She came very close to killing him, had about fifty pounds on him, was prepared to hold him down and make it slow. In the howling wind of the blizzard that had rolled in for the finale, she didn't seem to realize that they weren't alone. Not until Danh put a blade through her throat from behind, or rather, overhead.

Khazal's blood was still stiff in his hair, and now he was drenched afresh in Linalool's. Regardless of any favors passed between the two of them, both he and Danh had seen and done far too much by then to turn back.

He was truly just a little faster. Slightly quicker to aim to kill rather than to injure. In better shape, Danh having lost use of an arm in an earlier confrontation with the trainees. That was all it came down to, in the end. Two guys with knives, one of them bleeding out on the tundra, the other kneeling beside him, hesitating, unsure of what to do. No comforting words to offer.

Saxaul was baptized twice, the second time in blood and his own stunned silence.

* * *

**The 85th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Timothy Graham, District 10**

* * *

No one volunteered for him in the year with the most outer-district volunteers ever recorded. Young and old, in some districts the process dissolving into fist-fights in the aisles. Who could blame them for wanting to be Saxaul?

But none of them was a District 10 boy, so Timothy bowed his head and took his reaping in stride as best he could. He was no real firebrand. Didn't think his life was shitty enough for the Games to be a real alternative, but close, he supposed. Not like he hadn't thought about it, more as a fantasy than anything. At least it would be a break from his parents, who turned the floor of their home to eggshells whenever they were in it.

He was strong, because the best way to stay out of the house was to work, and his work kept him on a slaughterhouse floor. Some would say equally hellacious; he didn't especially mind it. Work was just work to him. He mopped up blood, cut throats, hauled carcasses. It beat getting caught in his parents' crossfire, for the most part. While he didn't envy his younger siblings, still too young for work, it wasn't like his older sister, Ruth, had ever stepped in to help him out.

Now she was God-only-knew-where, having fucked off as soon as she could tie down a husband, and he was on the stage, preparing to die.

Though he wasn't leaving behind much of a life, he'd never hoped for it to end quite like this.

The bloodbath was utter madness that year. None of them should have made it out alive, really, with so many sincere competitors, so many people there by choice and determined to fight it out. The Gamemakers must have planned for that, because when the gong sounded, the arena, which had seemed for the first minute to be an innocuous sandbar near a rocky shore, grey skies, low waves, suddenly dissolved into a stampede of horse-mutts that seemed to materialize from the water with steel-sharp hooves and wild eyes and gnashing teeth.

He'd always planned to make a run for it. This cemented his convictions, and he ran.

People's death screams sounded different than those of animals. Even with his back to the fighting, he heard more than enough of both to make that judgement. The trainees were nearly wiped out. Half the arena dead. The largest bloodbath on record.

When he picked his way back to the Cornucopia a day later, he found it abandoned, masses of horse carcasses rendering the area quite uninhabitable, the waves still murky red with blood as they lapped at the golden horn. He was able to acquire some supplies that had been abandoned in the fray, and with a heavy knife, easily butchered a few of the mutt corpses and did quite well for himself.

Cooking the meat over a brush fire, he met the first of his competitors, having been careful to avoid making friends in training. The allied pair from District 7 approached, seemingly uncertain about whether they were supposed to kill him or not. He suggested they give it a try, but maybe wait until he finished cooking the meat, since they likely wouldn't be able to handle the cuts as well as he could.

That broke the tension enough to laugh, and somehow he was allied with Lyrata and Bret, two volunteers who'd made it out of the havoc of the previous few days, the population of the arena already down to eleven.

Lyrata was insistent that there was something that could be done with the horse mutts, which returned periodically and seemed to have a taste for the flesh of their own kind. That was how she ultimately died - having constructed an elaborate trap with Timothy's help to lasso one, intending to ply it with the grasses on which they'd seen the mutts graze.

In her excitement at the prospect of taming the feral horse, she missed the one surviving trainee, the boy from District 1, who'd retained a spear and his ability to use it from the confusion at the bloodbath.

He killed the horse first. And then her, almost as an afterthought. Bret and Timothy had kept their distance while she attempted to calm the mutt, Timothy's wheelhouse being 'killing livestock' rather than 'domesticating livestock'. They were too late to save her, too late to catch the boy - Bezel - as he retreated.

Timothy had never been especially strong-willed, and Bret, spurred on by strategic gifts from Saxaul and what must have been a particularly profound mentor-mentee relationship, took over entirely from there with his feverish quest for revenge.

They weren't so much 'together' as Timothy was brought along in tow. While Bret didn't seem to mind killing everyone they encountered, anyone interfering - implicitly, by their sheer existence - with a matchup with Bezel, he didn't seem to have any interest in harming his ally, either. Timothy was profoundly uncomfortable with the whole thing. Considered making a break for it after Bret killed a boy who must have been barely fourteen who was just hungry, for the love of God, they could have _fed _him but he _killed_ him.

But if he wasn't proactive enough to volunteer, he certainly didn't have the gumption needed to walk out on an ally, and so he stayed, and waded through the blood that Bret shed until they reached Bezel in the final three. Two against one.

He wasn't as useful in the final fight as Bret must have hoped, keeping him around for so long. He'd never killed anyone, after all, this was so different from the slaughterhouse floor, this was a person, even if it was a person that his ally was convinced was something less than human.

Covered in blood, after all, it was so hard to tell the two young men apart.

Timothy would never be completely sure why he won, of the three of them. It felt a little like a mistake. Like surely Bezel's last eviscerating strike was meant for him, like there was no way Bret's knife, mid-fall, should have been allowed to sever an artery in his hated opponent's thigh. He was in the thick of it, after all. Shouldn't the Capitol have preferred a more charismatic victor?

Well, they'd have had to resurrect one if they wanted someone other than him. And they didn't.

He was the first of the victors since the Mockingjay Rebellion to win, drenched in blood, yes, but with none of it on his hands. His first and only kill, should he ever work up the courage to do it - unlikely - would be himself.

Not yet. But maybe someday.

* * *

**The 86th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Aaron Stenberg, District 2**

* * *

District 2's Center was never the best place for a truly good kid. Most of those bled out on the mat during culling matches or were quickly and quietly funneled to the Peacekeeping force before they could make fools of themselves. He wasn't the best, but he wasn't the worst, either, at least as that kind of 'goodness' went.

He had friends, after all, which was unique in the Center, even if some of his willingness to take that risk came from a confidence that, if need be, he could beat anyone in a match. Beat them he did. All of them, until the volunteer slot was his. Acquaintances, boyfriends, it didn't really matter, even though it did. Claudia thought that he was special, and there was nothing more important than her continuing to think that.

Anyone who'd experienced the Center would understand - her approval, her special attention, it just wasn't something you relinquished lightly. It was life or death in the culling matches. She might as well have been a deity of some sort, for all anyone was free of her power.

Aaron wasn't an exception, even with a life that extended outside of the Center's grip. The other planned volunteer had a twin brother, Luca, not in training but familiar enough with the whole process that nothing Aaron said could surprise him. He probably heard worse from Julia, after all. Things were good. He'd found a kind of happiness. He had something to lose. Claudia knew that all too well.

But life was pretty perfect, and he believed before anything that it would be even more perfect when he made it home from the Games, untouchable and exalted and everything he had always said he'd someday be. Well, him or Julia, but he was willing to gamble on its being him, their good-natured camaraderie concealing the truth they both understood in a way that Luca never truly could. One of them would die, and that was how it had to be. Claudia had taught them well. Prepared them - this would be their year.

Julia had style in a way that he didn't, but Aaron had perhaps just a little more natural talent, especially with negotiating alliances. None of that mattered once the trainee alliance fractured along district lines before the Games even began, the pair from District 1, Treasure and Ora, just too goddamned personality-having to really mesh. An amiable enough split, but a disappointment to Aaron.

As a pair, they got along fine, racking up kills at the bloodbath as they encountered, to their delight, a massive mountain encased in an enormous forcefield, a tremendous advantage for a pair of Twos with great familiarity with the terrain.

Meanwhile, a loner from District 11 named Loblolly established herself as the one to beat, methodically wiping out the competition one by one with fancy-looking sponsor gifts, a few times evading him and Julia, perhaps aware that she wouldn't be the one to come out of that alive. Managed to kill off Treasure, though, at some point. He definitely high-fived Julia when they saw that particular face in the sky, one true competitor down, one step closer to home.

Tragedy, or rather, _Loblolly_ struck before they could really get around to resting on their laurels. She caught Julia while she was on guard, late in her shift, having concealed herself expertly in a stand of trees that bore inedible fruit. He lost his partner in a few seconds to a sword in her stomach. Woke up just a little too late to save her, or even to say goodbye, but not too late to tear Loblolly limb from limb.

Earlier they had ribbed each other endlessly about which of them would comfort Luca after the other's death. Well, now he knew for sure. And Claudia certainly knew as well, because he began to receive gifts from a code in loaves of bread they had devised, based on the code that the victors had used during the 75th, to prepare for their rebellious escape. These loaves gave him specific instructions.

The first was to kill indiscriminately, to be done holding back.

With Loblolly's death, they had reached the final seven; she didn't need to tell him twice. Attacked by a mountain lion mutt, he shook it off immediately. The allied pair from Seven made the mistake of getting in his way. What he did to them was almost worse than what he did to Loblolly. Nothing distasteful, but so much blood, barely anything left for the hovercraft.

He could feel himself losing his grip. Claudia had to remind him to eat and drink with the loaves, or he might have starved. It was all so sick, so…

But so much more important, now that he understood, now that it was all on him. She might as well have been whispering in his ear in the night, Claudia's voice indistinguishable from his memories of Julia. Telling him what to do next. That was new, the hearing-voices. He didn't try to fight it, didn't question it. Just killed anyone he encountered. Felt his connection to anything real fraying. Wondered what Luca thought of all this.

Held on, just for him.

Finally, it was him and Ora, though his former ally was badly injured, desperate and fragmenting after the loss of her own partner. His demeanor must have been positively stoic in comparison; realizing how badly off he could be, he managed to rein himself in. To speak with her, though his voice was rusty with disuse.

Once he'd fought his way through the worst of it, of course. It was at the point of his spear that he asked her who had killed Treasure, who's name she had been repeating feverishly throughout their confrontation. As he killed her, quickly, mercifully, in contrast with all the others, he told her that he'd been the one to kill Loblolly, about Julia, about all of it… so close to spilling out the tumult of emotions, though he managed to hold them back as she choked out a thank you with her dying breath.

He shed a tear over her body as the anthem played in a way he couldn't for Julia. The Gamemakers wouldn't let him, had to rip her away and throw a mutt at him for distraction.

They had joked about him comforting Luca, but he never did. Couldn't look at him, at first, and then couldn't bear the thought of what Claudia would do to him if he failed her.

It was a hollow victory. They usually were, for the trainees of District 2. He understood that, now, why the Center had taken so much away from him already by the time he volunteered, so many friends, so many loves, so much of what he cared about.

They were preparing him for victory.

To Claudia's credit, it had worked.

* * *

**The 87th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Sharon Munhoz, District 11**

* * *

Cereus had long dreamed of a pair of volunteers every year in Eleven, an end to the uncertainty of the reaping, envious of the security with which the youths of the trainee districts went about their lives, confident, for good reason, that they would never be torn away for a day of bad luck.

She had a day of bad luck. Her partner volunteered, but _her_ smile was all fake. Appearances mattered, she knew that much, but she also knew that her odds weren't ideal. Cereus, to his credit, did not play favorites, despite having apparently worked with Aloe for years prior. His chief concern was that they both maximize their chances of bringing home the crown.

That - living through the Games - was a plan she could get behind.

He pulled some strings, though not too many. She'd scored an eight, after all, that was nothing to look down one's nose at. But it wouldn't have guaranteed her a spot in the trainee alliance had Cereus not leveraged some kind of friendship with the mentor from District 2.

It was persistently difficult not to loathe the trainees, even once she was technically with them, as they were technically her allies. She gave it a real try, though, and succeeded in actually liking the boy from District 2, whose name was Elex and who seemed almost as _done_ with the whole situation as she was. He had an easy sense of humor that matched her own, and as they entered the arena, a dense and unyielding jungle, they fought back to back in the bloodbath while she claimed her first kill, a loudmouthed older girl from District 6, and in doing so, cemented her place in the pack. Talked it out afterwards, this time face-to-face. He told her about the culling matches they did in District 2, about being forced to kill his friends. Bizarrely, she found herself comforting _him_.

She would have fit in more easily if the pair from District 1 weren't so relentlessly skeptical of her. The girl from District 4, Epaulette, was killed by some kind of shadowlike panther mutt in the night while she was on guard, but what was she supposed to do about that? It was invisible! That was the point of the mutt - and didn't she raise the alarm before Epaulette so much as screamed?

It was an unbelievably uncomfortable position to occupy, and the fact that he was more-or-less the only person being decent to her made her like Elex all the more, which was even itself _even more _uncomfortable, somehow.

Especially once they banded together to hunt about a week and a half in, a few kills already under their collective belts, and came upon Aloe, of all people. He could move about in the trees in a way they couldn't, managed to evade them without so much as a glance at Sharon, but Anneal from District 1 was growing ever more suspicious.

Moreso after she'd lost her partner, Doublet, this time when the alliance had gone head to head with the allied pair from Ten, unusually formidable this year. Still bound home in pine boxes, though they'd done more damage than anyone had expected.

She wondered how long she could keep things up in the alliance until Anneal finally had enough of her. That moment seemed to draw closer every day, and the trainee alliance (plus Sharon) was set to expire at the final eight.

And then it happened. Like anyone else, Sharon had to sleep. She woke to a blade on her throat, foiled what should have been a quick and easy execution by struggling even as the cold steel sunk into her neck, no no _no_ she had to get home, no! She hadn't killed those people for nothing!

Of course she hadn't.

Elex lifted Anneal off her bodily, as he would have hauled a misbehaving cat away from a beloved houseplant. Sharon didn't need to be told to kill her, wrenched the still-slick knife away from Anneal as she struggled and put it between her ribs, just like she'd learned in training.

All that, and he'd still valued her over another trainee, still chosen to save her. Final nine, the trainee alliance down to her, Elex, and the quiet boy from District 4 who'd never really shaken off the bad leg wound incurred in the same fight that had seen the One boy dead. It would have been almost pleasant, in a 'denial' sort of way, had they not encountered Aloe again just two days later.

Elex threw his spear, finally managed to knock him out of the canopy. Her district partner lay, prone, bleeding, on the jungle floor. He grinned back at her, nodded her forward - she had paid lip service to wanting to kill Aloe, after all, but she'd just been trying to get Anneal off her case, how could he not _understand _that...

She stabbed Elex in the back, literally. Didn't wait to see him die before she killed the boy from District 4, too, his cannon sounding before any others. And now she had two dying boys before her. Who to comfort? Who to aid?

Aloe's neck was broken. She knelt beside him as he choked to death, helpless. Lifted his head just slightly, helped him get his last goodbyes out. District loyalty, it turned out, ran deep. He died in her arms. Elex bled out somewhere behind her. She wept over a different body.

Somehow, she managed to pull herself together for a showdown with an unknown quantity, a shrewd loner from District 6 who'd been stalking the trainees throughout the Games. Entirely without their knowledge. He struck a day later, once she was about to drop from exhaustion. Final two.

He'd seen everything. Knew everything about her, about all of them. Tried to convince her that Elex had loved her, that she was something even less than worthless for having…

For a minute, she let him pretend the gambit was working.

Then she killed him, far more savagely than she had anyone else thus far. She didn't give a shit about the growing pile of dead men in her wake, they were _dead_, they were _free _of all this, they'd be _fine_.

God fucking damn it, she wanted to go _home_.

And she did. Cried in Cereus' arms until she had nothing left, then dried her eyes for good. Moved on to other things. The world opened up to a victor willing to do what needed to be done, and Sharon had never forgotten that her allegiance was to District 11, first and only.

* * *

**The 88th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Corsage Perrier, District 1**

* * *

It was never really a question of whether he was a good person. He'd always known he wasn't. Good people didn't want to do the things he did. And he knew what a bad person looked like, too, because his family was full of them.

Unfortunately for almost everyone, he was a quick learner.

From the beginning, he couldn't do anything right by Sequin's standards. Everything was too 'excessive', every idea he proposed, often as jokes, too 'disgusting' - as though _she _knew what the Capitol wanted, when One hadn't had a new victor in nearly a decade. Finish was mostly absent, but he did come through at the last second, get Corsage into the volunteer position, inadvertently sparing his family what he'd been planning to do to them if he truly had no way out.

Sequin was furious. That made it a lot more fun, even though Finish seemed to want little to do with him. When he finally cornered the older man to demand that he tell him why he'd so thoroughly gone to bat for someone he wouldn't even speak to, Finish smiled, drained his glass of wine, and told Corsage that he was curious to see what would happen.

He resolved, then and there, to give Finish a show to make all the trouble worth his while.

And he did.

Things no one had thought to do in the arena, no one believed they would get away with… he gave it a try, knowing that Sequin surely had no intention of letting him leave the Games as victor, so why not try it all… everything he'd ever wanted to do? His district partner, Star, ever the level-headed good-girl, grew progressively more horrified with him, but suffered too adamantly from loyalty, the worst of vices, to walk away or put him down.

They'd grown up together, after all, everyone in the District 1 Center. This side of him was new to her. He'd hid it well. Didn't bother hiding anything from the District 11 girl, the District 5 girl, the District 10 girl, their ally from Two, even, when she seemed to be getting big ideas about ducking out of the alliance early.

He waited for the divine to intervene and strike him down. It would feel like vindication when they did, surely. He waited, waited, waited for an intervention that would never come.

Well, eventually a pack of mutt hyenas did intervene, in the final six, when Star had finally had enough of him. Funny to think that her continued allegiance had been keeping him alive all that time. The overgrown dogs had a go at tearing into him, and he thought, finally, this is it, _finally it's all over._ He'd expected to die violently all his life. Anyone with his parents would see that as an eminently viable option.

But then, Star, that loyal goddamned idiot, had to come back and intervene. She saved his life, and he found himself abruptly furious - did she not get how this was supposed to work? Did she sincerely think she was that much better than him? That had to be it - she'd always thought she was so much fucking _better_ than him.

Surrounded by piles of bleeding carcasses, both of them badly injured, he showed her just how fucking right she'd been. And then it was final five, not six.

If what he'd already done wasn't enough, then what would be? He'd just have to try harder, and so he did. By the final three - him and the allied pair from Eight, oddly enough - he could almost match An in terms of body count. And then he killed the both of them, too, starting with the girl, of course, having broken her partner's arms and legs so he couldn't stop him.

At some point, it all started to blend together. All the blood and all the screaming.

Not that there'd been any more of that, since he won. He woke up with a chip in his brain and Sequin out for fucking blood, kept on a tight leash - he figured out the limits to what he could do pretty quickly, but pressed at them relentlessly, as he'd always done.

Funny how everyone who'd created him was so quick to disown him once he actually did what he'd always been very clear about wanting to do.

Even Finish. Even his fucking family.

He just thought it was kind of funny, and someday he was going to figure out a way around the stupid chip and kill every last one of them. Just had to bide his time until then. And he would.

While he was never an especially patient man, for this, at least, he could wait forever.

* * *

**The 89th Hunger Games**

**Victor: Cora Davis, District 2**

* * *

She would prefer not to think about her Games. Most of the memories are too foggy, anyway, for the exercise to be of more use than watching one of the cuts. People on the internet seem to remember more of the specifics of what she did than she does, and in some ways she's grateful for that, because it was terrible. She was terrible. She knows, intellectually, that she is capable of terrible things.

There are excuses she could make; a cruel and manipulative mentor, absent parents, unrestricted access to opioid analgesics throughout her childhood. She tries not to. Healing requires an acceptance that something fixable was wrong in the first place. The only thing she can fix is herself.

For the most part, she'd prefer to look forward. Lately, though, the finale of the Games has been looming over the dashboard. Marina believes this is the way to heal the country from the Games, to ensure they don't slip back into the fabric of everyday life. She has the numbers, as Marina always does, the research and the schematics and the focus groups to back it up.

This should do it, settle it for the generations to come.

One more Games.

Greater and more terrible than ever before.

She's not sure if she buys that. Saxaul certainly doesn't, but she's torn between two of the people she trusts most in the world, here, people who built her up from nothing. Because of Marina, she can walk into work every morning in a pair of rough calico scrubs and heal people, really do something with her own two hands, really be something other than a murderer, other than what Claudia made her, other than what she allowed herself to be made.

Spending half her life knitting flesh back together, it's stomach-churning to remember that she'll be forced to be a part of it again. All over again. So soon. Just a year to go before they'll have to do what she did or die. Or both. Both is always a spicy option.

For the moment, she ignores the oncoming finale as best she can, which is a coward's way out, she knows, the opposite of what Saxaul is doing, having fought it every step of the way. She can't bring herself to fight anymore. She made a promise to herself that she would never kill another person. And here she is, so desperate not to be a part of killing, so powerless to stop it.

How is it possible that they're all so utterly helpless? The victors, the most powerful people in the country, in theory - they fuel the machine, in their way, and it grinds on around them endlessly.

The past three years have been so much healing. But not enough.

Maybe Saxaul is right and Panem is rotted from the inside out.

She can't be sure of that, but if he's right, well… she's a trauma nurse, now, and she's treated gangrene before. Right now, the closest thing she has to a shred of power in all of this, the same as the rest of the victors, is mentorship, though she's in the unique position of never having done that before, an amateur in a cast of experts.

Whoever her tributes will be, she'll do her best to do right by them.

But she'll miss the certainty and the routine of the hospital, where, at the very least, she knows when a choice was the right one. There are rules, and patterns, and clearly desirable outcomes. The patient wakes up, the baby gasps her first breath, the lesions disappear from the arthritic's joints.

As far as she can gather, Marina's buoyant confidence notwithstanding, no one's completely sure what's going to happen with these Games. Even Herodotus can only give them apologetic platitudes; he doesn't know, himself, every part of these Games he's supposed to be making. She's pulling the strings, like usual, and as is typical of her, she's keeping most of it close to the vest.

Greater and more terrible, though.

A Games to end all Games.

As all the victors must, she wonders what could be _worse_ than what happened to her, what she did, what she has to live with.

They'll all find out soon enough.

x

_Meet your mentors! As you submit tributes, moving forward, be aware that one of these stellar young people will be 'randomly' assigned to mentor each district, including those without victors, in accordance with this list (which will also be posted on my profile). We'll elaborate on why and how in the next chapter._

_District 1 - Timothy_  
_District 2 - Claudia_  
_District 3 - Neveah_  
_District 4 - Saxaul_  
_District 5 - Corsage_  
_District 6 - Cora_  
_District 7 - An_  
_District 8 - Aaron_  
_District 9 - Polly_  
_District 10 - Sharon_  
_District 11 - Sequin_  
_The Capitol - Cereus_

_Particularly if you've read Memento Mori, where all of them get a lot of screen time, as they will in this work, you may be interested in submitting to specific districts based on this information. Additionally, particularly when you're submitting to districts that have been more fleshed-out in canon (such as the trainee districts), this chapter may prove helpful. I'm still looking for tributes very flexibly across the board, and I hope that if you're interested you'll send some my way!_

_Additionally, I should have mentioned this earlier, but if you're new to the universe I highly encourage you to read the first chapter of Memento Mori, which establishes the 'givens' of the universe in relation to canon. Thanks for all the submissions so far!_


	3. Sweet Kid

Sweet Kid

x

I don't need the world to see  
That I've been the best I can be, but  
I don't think I could stand to be  
Where you don't see me

'Francis Forever', Mitski Miyawaki

x

Marina Trevino-Snow, The Capitol (The 72nd Hunger Games)

"Me _molesta_ la escuela!" she began, immediately upon pushing past the front door of her parents' apartment, not noticing the peculiarity that it was unlocked. "Papa! Wait until you hear… you're going to be so mad, my teacher is the worst, I'm going to drop out and join the circus!"

It was not an idle threat. Her father had taken her to a travelling circus not too long ago and she'd been captivated. The gowns, the glitter, the endless sound and motion and light and music. And it had been just the two of them, which made it better. She could relax with her father, while most of the time she spent in front of her mother felt like she was auditioning for something far more high-stakes than tightrope walking or trapeze artistry.

With a satisfyingly heavy noise, she briefly dropped her book bag by the shoe hutch.

"_Enojadísima_ estoy yo!" she declared crossly, glancing around the living room and waiting for her father to walk out, ruffle her hair, ask what had happened to bother her so profoundly.

It had been the first day of classes in her new school. She was ten, and accustomed to her old school, where things has been done a certain way. Now she was stuffed into an uncomfortable uniform, surrounded by people who didn't know her, a teacher who stopped on her name and stuttered, then treated her weirdly all day.

A quintessential overachiever, Marina didn't appreciate being coddled in the slightest, had been looking forward to impressing her teacher with her ability to sign her name in cursive and with the writing skills her father, a university professor, had been helping her to work on in the time they spent together at home. She was a good writer. Her dad said so, but how was she going to prove that to anyone else if her stupid teacher didn't write a single red mark on her short essay and got too nervous to call on her in class?

"Papa!" she called again, frowning, having expected to find him in the kitchen or in his study off the front room.

"In the dining room, querida," her father called, and she let out the anxious breath she'd been holding upon hearing his voice, though he sounded…

"Papa?" she asked, dragging her heavy book bag into the dining room in the back of the apartment, frowning at the odd smell. "Are you baking something?"

Like flowers, sort of, with an undercurrent of…

Her father was a tall man, broad-shouldered, had a kind of imposing presence uncommon to a career academic until he smiled. But seated at their dining room table, the afternoon light filtering in through the fancy lace curtains of the house that had been theirs for the last few months, he looked… smaller than usual.

That wasn't the first cue that something was wrong, but it was the first that she consciously observed.

Across the table from her father, hidden until she stepped into the room, sat a man she'd only ever seen in family photos, whose name she only knew from her parents' tense conversations and muffled arguments overheard through their bedroom door. Well, outside of his face on banners, at parades, ubiquitously on the television, in her history books...

Those fights, in which his name came up, had grown more common lately. She figured it had something to do with her moving schools yet again, why they never stayed in one house for too long, her father's troubles at the university, his increasing paranoia that they were under observation, no matter how her mother tried to argue that surely her father would do no such thing.

Well, he was certainly doing _something_.

"Marina, is it?" her grandfather said kindly, smiling, she thought, quite sincerely.

But at the same time, more the way someone might smile at the antics of a prized show dog than, particularly, the way a grandfather smiles at a child.

She set her bag down, glancing worriedly from her father to the President of Panem and back again.

"Where's mama?" she asked.

"I love you, Marina," her father said, quietly but with a deeply unsettling urgency to his voice.

Now, she was well and truly worried, clamping her mouth shut and trying not to make eye contact with her grandfather. Nothing about his stature should have been terrifying. He was… well, it would have been rude to call him 'withered', right?

"You'll be joining your mother very soon," the President told her, still with a kind of mild, conversational tone.

"And where is Thalia?" her father demanded. "You can't -"

"Mr. Trevino, with utmost respect, we're well past debating the nuances of what I can and cannot do. I could have brought Peacekeepers with me - very honorably, I think, I chose not to, given your seditious past. Well, our pasts have a way of clinging to our present. I can't imagine you're much a fan of the armed forces."

"My wife -"

"Not for much longer. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the necessary papers have been filed. I'm just here to have a chat, you understand, to ensure we're on the same page about how this divorce will be proceeding, given the implications for family finances, Thalia being my legal heir."

Her father raked his hand through his hair, watching her, not her grandfather, with an emotion she'd never seen him wear before. She wanted nothing more than to run away, but felt transfixed by the situation, horribly, as she would have been watching two trains bound on a collision course. Unable to intervene, unable to do anything to stop what must be a disaster in motion, she knew these words, what they meant, but couldn't fathom why he looked so _scared_…

"I don't want your money," her father said, finally, tearing his eyes away from her and squaring his shoulders. "But you can't have Marina. I don't know where Thalia's head is at, running back to you, with everything I know… keep your _filthy money_, but leave my daughter out of it."

"Yes, custody will be an interesting question. You might begin preparing yourself for a verdict you don't quite like, Mr. Trevino. After all, it would be a shame to see a promising young lady like Marina raised in the household of someone with so many… skeletons in the closet. I've respected Thalia's wishes, thus far, but conveniently enough, she now wishes to return to my home, and for dear Marina to join us. I think that's very reasonable of her. Rather more reasonable than I thought within her capability, to be frank."

He smiled indulgently, as though he expected her father to join in, somehow. Of course, he didn't, wouldn't use that kind of tone to talk about _her mother_, definitely not in front of _her_. She frowned.

While she'd learned in school that the President had near-infinite power, that it was immoral to question it, that his position was ordained by his superior sensibilities and that sedition was tantamount to blasphemy, well… she was the President's granddaughter, even if there was something going on with her father that he couldn't… speak his mind, in his own house.

So if he could just march in like he owned the place, didn't it make sense that she could say what she wanted to say? Being related and all?

"Excuse me," she interrupted, before her father could speak again. "I think you're being really rude."

That was how her father chided her when she was snippy with Philoten, who she was always forced to spend time with at fancy events, and probably how he would have responded when she came home complaining about her awful teacher, so the criticism was fresh in her mind and she felt very justified in delivering it, crossing her arms and glancing, just slightly, up at her father to see if he was approving, maybe smiling…

All of the blood seemed to have drained from his face. Pure fear, the kind that made her chest feel cold and hollow, like her heart had sunk down to her knees all at once.

It was her grandfather who was smiling, now, just a little too wide and cold to be a real expression.

"Do you, my dear?" he said.

Well, she was in too deep to stop now, wasn't she? If she eased off, if her father stepped in, that would be… that would have to make things worse. So she forged ahead.

"...yeah. This isn't even your house, I don't even know you."

"A nice contrast with Herodotus," her grandfather observed, and she frowned, recognizing her cousin's name.

"What about Hero?" she asked, feeling her forehead pinch even further into the frown.

"Eight is early to make a verdict on a child's spinelessness, but I find I'm usually right about these sorts of things," he sighed.

"Please," her father said, his voice coming out sort of pinched, like his throat was closing up.

Her grandfather quirked up an eyebrow, waiting for him to elaborate.

"...don't take her."

"I'm not going to take her anywhere. Do I look like a kidnapper to you, Mr. Trevino? Quite an insult. No, but what a shame that I hadn't met my only granddaughter, and now with Thalia being so accommodating…"

The older man trailed off, watching Marina thoughtfully.

"Well, you met me!" she interjected, very awkward about everything going on, wishing her father would stop looking so grey and fearful, nervous that she'd said the wrong thing about her cousin and gotten somebody in trouble.

This really did feel like trouble, and she didn't like that one bit.

"Certainly. Marina, dearest, I have a small gift for you. It's very useful, not just an ornament."

He produced a little velvet box, offered it to her. She looked back at her father, then at him, waiting for someone to tell her what to do.

No one did. Her father wouldn't meet her eyes.

She opened the little box, to find a miraculous little pin, gold, with a carved emerald leaf and red petals made of glimmering red stones. It was probably the most beautiful thing that she'd ever seen.

"As I mentioned, it's a useful trinket," he explained, kindly, now, leaning in to take the pin and affix it to the lapel of her uniform with oddly slender, too-smooth fingers, not uncommon in the Capitol but unfamiliar to her.

So close, the smell of flowers was overpowering, and she could almost make out something sharp and metallic in the background.

"What does it do?" she asked, tucking her chin in so that she could look down at the sparkling pin.

"Many things. But most importantly, if you twist the head of the rose, you'll put a call through to your mother and myself. Should you ever need help. And it's our family crest. You'd do well to get used to wearing such things."

She nodded, reaching up and rolling the gold stem between her fingers.

"Ah, thank you," she said, unable to suppress the manners with which she'd been brought up, and surprised by the beautiful little gift. "It's really nice, thanks, um, Mr. President."

"Grandfather will do just fine," he said kindly, and she almost believed the kindness, for the moment.

Would have completely, really - it was such a lovely gift - were it not for her father's expression, the way he seemed to have aged five years since that morning, sitting across from her grandfather at their long dining room table.

"Thank you, grandfather," she said quickly, stepping back and offering him a little bow, hoping this would all be over soon, that the tension and the chill of the room might abate along with the smell of flowers and blood once he left the room.

He stood, easily for a man whose appearance conveyed such age, and offered her a little nod, something approaching the conventional bow himself. Which made her frown all over again, since it was unconventional _enough_ for an adult to bow to a child, but the President to a ten year old, when she'd spent the whole day planning how best to whine to her father about how much she hated her teacher?

It was all very wrong, but in such an oddly flattering way.

And the chill didn't leave the house, after her father exchanged a few more quiet words with her grandfather in the hall. Once the door had closed and most of the floral smell had wafted out, her father returned to the dining room and held her to him in a crushing embrace, like he was terrified that she would be torn away.

She tugged on his sleeve and repeated the concerns of the day, hoping to get his mind on something else, that ridiculous Mrs. Stallings and how she'd completely known the year of the final triumph over the rebels and also basically everything about the history of that time period, since he studied it, after all, but she never got to say a word since every time Mrs. Stallings looked at her she made a face, and wasn't that awful? If this was the first day of school, how was she possibly going to get through two hundred more days of this before she got to move up a grade level and have another teacher?

But he didn't reply with the expected laughter, admonishment, advice about how to turn every day into a learning experience, reminder about how to learn things from people even when they were saying things you already knew.

He always had the answers, but now, it seemed, he had forgotten them.

After an almost uncomfortably long silence, he poured himself a glass of wine. Then another. Reminded her to get her homework in order, as an afterthought. That was the most shocking part of it, he always wanted to see her finish quickly, so they could spend the rest of the night going over her answers, he cared so much about school.

"I don't know what's happening, Marina," he said quietly, over an unusually simple meal.

"Is mama coming -"

"No."

"But she -"

"I'm sorry, querida."

He was. She could tell he was.

School was unpleasant, but she made do, as she always did. She'd never made friends easily. Her father used to joke about her high standards. Lately, he stopped joking about almost anything.

Her mother called in one night to let them know that movers would be coming by to take her things. He barely reacted, just poured himself more wine. Marina's room was untouched, but the room her parents had shared was nearly stripped bare.

She wondered how everything had gone wrong so quickly.

It must have had something to do with the new school, she decided. They'd fought over the uniform, whether it was appropriate to send her in on the first day with ankle socks instead of knee socks, as the requirements stated. Her father had thought it was fine - Marina hated knee socks, they cut off her circulation and left marks. Her mother had found the idea of her being singled out for poor adherence to dress code untenable.

That had to be it.

She shouldn't have complained about the knee socks.

At some point, her father stopped sleeping. She wouldn't have really noticed, but it was also around the time that he started to struggle to walk without stumbling into furniture, to speak coherently, to pour wine without splashing half of it over the tabletop. And _snapping at her_, which he had never done, would never do, it simply didn't make sense.

Once she went to bed each night, she could still hear him, shuddering and lurching around in the living room, knocking into the coffee table, the bookcase, seemingly not feeling it.

So badly, she wanted not to be scared of him, of what was happening. But the vitality seemed to be draining out of him, greying further with every passing day. At some point, she realized he had stopped going into work, hadn't picked up a book or opened his holo-tablet in days.

That night, she heard him stumble, heard his body hit the hardwood floor but continue to twitch.

She rolled out of bed. Her eyes felt wet, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She dug through her little box of treasures, found the flower.

Twisted the head of the jeweled rose, held her breath, and waited.

x

Marina Trevino-Snow, The Capitol (The 74th Hunger Games)

Now that she knew a thing or two about poison, she knew that it was mercury that he'd used to kill her father. Slow-acting, to obfuscate the point of exposure. In this case, the first few bottles of wine, though he was also partial to coffee. Equally bitter, obscured the taste. And of course, the descent into instability, into seizures and brain failure and death… in the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, with some help from a suspiciously clean autopsy report, it was just the sad story of a man who had lost his grip.

She never said as much, but there was an understanding between them, that she knew these things. He didn't exactly try to hide it. How could he really deny it to his family, with a physician on staff to administer antidotes, a silver-haired man named Cerimon Boult who might-or-might-not actually be a doctor?

It was Dr. Boult, as she called him (he seemed to appreciate that) who taught her about poisons.

Perhaps her grandfather had directed him to do so.

Even if he hadn't, he certainly didn't mind.

And what her mother didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

She withdrew from the private academy, where she'd never much liked it anyway. Instead, they brought tutors to the mansion. It wasn't safe, now that she was so close to the President, should his political enemies get ideas… she gathered that there were many of those. So she stayed inside, and didn't mind _that _part of the transition one bit. More time to read. In time, she requested a few of the books that her father had written, one of which was very hard to acquire, as it had been removed from public shelves under suspicion of treason.

One of her earlier memories involved her parents fighting over a court appearance whether to settle, who to pay and how much to keep him alive.

He was an excellent writer. So many ideas she'd never really considered outside of vague conversations, him always being so evasive, worried about what she might repeat. Well, now she didn't have to worry, right? What he'd feared had already happened.

It was hard, because waking up in such a fine bedchamber, practically being carried to breakfast by avoxes - she was certain that they would if she asked - felt like a terrible betrayal. Enjoying it felt like pure perfidy. But she _did _enjoy it. No one told her not to be rude to Philo anymore, and now that she and her mother were back in the arms of her grandfather, no one, not Philoten Lorca, not Lucia Aldon, not even Herodotus seemed able to find a bad word to say about her.

She regretted that last part. She and Hero had survived many an unbearable family dinner together, giggling over gossip about their own family members, making jokes about everything from aunt Helen's latest surgical mishap to poison, just whispers of it, really, though that was the one they really got in trouble over.

Now, he, like everyone else, was just a little scared of her. Careful, like he would have been while handling an expensive trinket made of paper-thin blown glass. Like if she broke, he might be cut viciously on the edges.

Who could she confide in, now?

More often than not, she found herself at the door of her grandfather's study. Since her mother, lately, was so pale and listless. Her few acquaintances always at arm's length, her tutors professional and businesslike.

One day, she finally had the courage to knock, hearing his voice ebb and the sound of the television rise to take its place.

Because she was lonely.

No other excuse.

"Grandfather?" she called.

"Marina? Come in, dearest."

She stepped in carefully, her sequined unicorn slippers and soft-but-sparkly pink nightgown suddenly feeling much too childish, ridiculous, too ostentatious for this errand.

On the holo-screen in his home office, a cavernous wood-panelled room filled with fresh-cut flowers, conspicuously missing any windows or doors other than the one reinforced entrance, the Games were indeed playing. A raw cut, she observed, watching the boy from District 10, the one with the bad leg, make a snorkling noise and scratch at his lower back.

The broadly disseminated cut always removed that kind of thing.

So she was watching it live, then.

"Trouble sleeping? I'll admit, I struggle with much the same problem," he said quietly, picking up a cup of tea, taking a long sip.

It was a beautiful tea set. Chains of little roses in every color, gilded, so it must be from District 1.

"Sort of," she said.

"You might consider getting used to that now. It won't improve as you age," he sighed.

She nodded, her gaze wandering to the holo-screen, where the District 11 girl, who was about her age, trembled in the upper boughs of a tree, supported by delicate branches, barely more than the diameter of her wrist.

"Rue Staton," her grandfather observed. "You enjoy the Games, correct?"

"Yes," she replied, still transfixed by the sight of the girl just… crying, it looked like, staring up at the sky and crying quietly.

They never showed this sort of thing in the main cut.

"Tell me, do you think she'd make a good victor?"

She turned away from the screen so quickly that she nearly hurt her neck, frowning at him without really meaning to, just not able to control her expression in her surprise.

"What do you mean?"

"Precisely what I say, usually. Why, or why not, do you think she might make a serviceable victor?"

Marina paused.

"'Serviceable' is different than 'good'."

"It is indeed."

"District Eleven would be… happy."

"Would they be?"

"...yes," she said, without much confidence. "They haven't had a victor in a long time, everyone says they're probably due one."

"So you believe that they'd like to see this child kill another child. That would appease them."

"No…" she trailed off. "Maybe not. But it would be… better than seeing her die, probably, right?"

"They've seen many of their children die. What makes this one different?"

Luckily, the screen shifted away from Rue wiping away her tears, sitting up, resolutely opening her bag for a handful of edible greens she'd collected to chew, before she could grow captivated by the scene again. It shifted to her district partner, asleep, deep in the grain field.

"Her score, and her… she's very brave. She's my age. I wouldn't…"

He chuckled.

"No, I doubt you'd fare especially well in the Games. None of us would. They're not built for us. I'm curious, though, if you can tell me why little Rue is not going to win the Games."

"She's…"

"I'll remind you right now, it's little to do with what she is, and everything to do with what she would represent, as a symbol. I've read your father's books as well, I understand he was fond of those. And he was correct about a great many of them."

She blinked.

"She means… something unexpected. Someone small triumphing over great odds, not exactly playing by the rules. The… norms, I mean, the way she plays isn't the way you're really supposed to win, the hiding and all. Her victory might be… inflammatory."

"Excellent choice of words. You're correct, though, to observe that District Eleven is due a victor… as much as they're due anything, really. Her partner would make a far better choice, in terms of in-district outcome. But tell me, how do you think Thresh would handle the Capitol?"

At events in the years since her father's death, she'd been introduced to a number of victors. Had her own thoughts on all of them. Sort of a fascination, really. It was always the first question she asked of her mother as they prepared for the galas held in the ballroom of her grandfather's house.

She particularly liked Annie Cresta, though she knew her grandfather didn't think especially much of the young woman as a victor. The others that he didn't like much tended to be the obstinate types, like Johanna, who seemed to hate her - and everyone, it probably wasn't personal - immediately upon meeting her.

"He might not… like the Capitol very much," she said. "Like some of the victors who… have trouble, here."

"Who would you suggest, were I to hand you the reins this second?"

"The boy from Twelve," she said immediately.

He smiled. As genuinely as he ever did.

"Ah, the certainty is admirable."

"Well, everyone likes him already. More than, you know, the girl, really. And she'd be… I think she'd be like…"

She didn't want to say Johanna's name aloud. People she named might get in trouble, and she got the sense that Johanna had already had more than enough of that. Remembered, too vividly, for just a moment, the sound her father's body made as it hit the floor, the way it kept moving for minute after minute after that.

"...unhappy," she finished. "Like, unhappy. I think the excitement over the two of them is… good, but it should be him who wins. He'd be fine on his own. She wouldn't be exciting without him."

"I may have to have Seneca step down sooner than expected," he sighed. "A replacement appears so readily."

She smiled.

She couldn't _not_, really, not when… well, it felt good, what he was saying about her. It usually did. He was very careful, never spoke poorly of her, in her earshot, at least. It felt just as sticky and unpleasant as waking up every morning that her father didn't, but it also felt so good.

"Did you have a question, dearest?" he added, as though he'd just consciously realized that she was in his study in her pajamas in the dead of night.

"...can I stay up with you and watch?" she asked.

"Of course."

It would not be the last time that she did so. That was how she witnessed the escalating tensions between her grandfather and the Head Gamemaker, Seneca Crane, who she'd met many times before. He'd seemed pleasant enough at victory banquets. But something seemed to be different about these Games.

The conversation about unrest had not been a one-off. Quickly, it seemed to be the only question on her grandfather's mind. How to quell it, what to do about it when Johanna Mason made yet another untoward comment, something about the rule change, just a silly throwaway line about how much easier her Games might have been if _she_ hadn't been forced to kill her own district partner.

Her grandfather was livid, and she couldn't figure out precisely why. It didn't seem the worst thing that a person could say, after all. He explained, calmly, succinctly, in the way he only did when he was barely concealing a bout of fury, that the setup relied on the rule change being treated with the gravity that it deserved, that it was vital that no one, particularly not the victors, who wielded such influence, be treating it like a joke.

Johanna could not be made to apologize, for some reason she didn't fully understand. But she did disappear from the public eye for some time.

Personally, she was beginning to observe some cracks in the structure of the thing. Forcing everybody to take things so seriously seemed counterproductive, almost. Wouldn't it be easier to make a joke of Johanna, to get people to take her less seriously?

But, no, she had to be punished. Everything seemed to lead back to a need to punish people into submission.

She wondered if that was the best way. If Johanna would be so inclined to speak out the way she did if she weren't so frequently made the object of her grandfather's wrath. His administration's wrath, of course, but it was really his. After all, Finnick never seemed to be the one whose family had to be harmed, himself imprisoned or disappeared from public eye, and _he_ never caused trouble.

Maybe she had it backwards. It was hard to get a straight answer from anyone about the victors' treatment, especially her grandfather.

But she had ideas. About how things could be better.

No one ever explicitly said the phrase 'when she was President' aloud, but increasingly, she was convinced that was the end goal. Her math and science lessons, after all, had taken a back seat, lately, to history of government, economics, organizational planning.

She learned that her father's continuing to speak a tongue other than the common language of Panem was itself an act of rebellion, and quieted her own use of it as the word was thrown around more frequently.

The issue was no longer just unrest.

Rebellion.

It was more a curious concept to her than a bone-chilling one, as it seemed to be to her grandfather. The penalty, she guessed, of all the cruelty he had done. She hadn't forgotten, though to do so would have been precariously easy.

He might have been stylish about it, might have dressed it up in banners and anthems and loyalty and ceremony, but he was a bully. No different than Philoten Lorca making fun of her father's shoes.

Well, that wasn't exactly true.

There was much more to it than the little that she understood. Hard though it was to admit. The world was far more complicated than she liked.

Perhaps the worst part was that she seemed to be good at it, the way things worked. He was fond of asking her what she would do in response to inconceivably complicated political dilemmas, and only rarely acted even marginally on her advice. But it was the quickest way to get a nod of approval, she found.

And she couldn't not appreciate those nods, no matter how she tried.

She was watching in his study when Katniss and Peeta of Twelve jointly won the 74th Hunger Games. She was the first to witness the fireworks that ensued.

She knew that Seneca Crane was dead before he did.

x

Marina Trevino-Snow, the Rebel Capitol (after the 75th Hunger Games)

The rebels were deliberately careful about how they handled her, which was something of a relief after what a small band of them had done to her mother.

She and her grandfather both, him chained in his gardens, her confined to her chambers, were neither beaten nor murdered. They were kept separate, save for dinner, which she was permitted to bring to him. The treatment with soft gloves now, she knew, concealed something much worse yet to come.

Bruises showed better on clean skin.

She was technically, if not in actuality, prepared to die. As ready as a freshly fourteen year old could conceivably be. She imagined, vividly, in the hours staring at the canopy of her bed, unable to focus on her book, what that sound her father's body had made as it fell would be like from inside the falling body itself. What it might be like to hit the floorboards and never get up again.

Hopefully, she wouldn't twitch. That had been the worst of it, the twitching. Hopefully it would be fast.

That was just a hope, of course, and a stupid one at that.

It hadn't gone quickly for her mother, now, had it?

Half of the rebels were barely more than her age, which made it all much worse. She'd never been especially good with other young people, and now here were a number of them, armed and often masked and almost always shouting orders, at each other or at her.

And, well, they weren't wrong. She was certainly complicit. Had certainly enjoyed her soft bed and soft hands. Had blood on them, even if she hadn't spilled it herself, even if she'd never been able to look at her father's body, let alone touch it.

So she didn't fight it. Just let the current move her.

The rebel government, headed by President Alma Coin, announced that the surviving victors had voted, and that a new Games would be held. It wasn't quite what she'd been expecting, but in hindsight, it made perfect sense. The Capitol Trials. It would not be a trial any more than her grandfather's 'quell' had meaningfully quelled anything more than his ability to maintain cohesion in a splintering country.

She would inevitably be called on to compete. And she would die.

It took about a day to accept that much. She didn't cry, knowing they were waiting for her to cry, to be pathetic about it, to prove everyone right about her, that she was some spoiled idiot thing, a symptom of the poisoning rather than the poison itself.

Privately, she knew better.

Held herself together.

Wondered if the arena would have a hardwood floor for her to collapse on. Probably not. So she wouldn't die like her father. Her mother might be a better example of what would happen to her.

She should be grateful, probably, that Herodotus has been air-lifted out in the Snows' last hovercraft. At least they wouldn't have to hurt each other any more than they already had, just by being part of this stupid family. Because he surely would have been called on to compete as well. Barely twelve to her fourteen. That wouldn't have gone well.

A few things still seemed incomprehensible about the whole situation.

For one, her grandfather seemed unphased by all of it, even as he sat shackled in his own rose garden. Over dinner, he asked, inevitably, for news of District 2. Which was ridiculous, because District 2 was long fallen, the taking of Mount Lupus publicized months ago, around the time the Mockingjay had been shot. She couldn't imagine what he expected to learn. What about the 'no news, I don't think, but I'll ask again if you like' seemed to bring him such comfort.

"Well, no news is good news," he would say calmly, sipping his tea, hollow-eyed and paper-skinned, looking sicker and smaller than she'd ever seen him.

Dr. Boult had escaped along with Herodotus and the rest of their family.

If this went on for long enough, her grandfather would simply die of his own poisoning, which would be poetic enough, she supposed. But likely not what the rebels would prefer. Just what he would deserve, and they didn't seem to care all that much about what anyone deserved.

Her mother, after all, hadn't deserved what they did to her.

She tried to talk to him about that, knowing it was intended to demoralize him, to hurt them both, thinking they must have some common ground on this, at least. It was a sad thing, that her dying grandfather was the only person left with whom she had any common ground to speak of. Not as though she was going to discuss the trauma of finding her mother's body with any of the young rebels who guarded her door.

"It just seemed like they were trying to… throw what you… we… what had been done… back at us," she said one evening, over a plate of stew on rice. One for him and one for her.

"Violence begets violence," he said, and she suspected that he would have shrugged had all his faculties not been necessary to keep hold of the stew with trembling hands.

"Then why did you…" She trailed off, not knowing how to express it, the magnitude of what had been done.

"Well, there's a reason that violence begets violence. It's hardly a platitude and certainly not a useless one. Violence _works_. You'll notice that, as dire as the situation may seem in the present, Panem has remained stable for three quarters of a century. This is merely a return to the old style of violence, in the Dark Days. What happened to your mother is nothing new."

Involuntarily, she felt herself nodding along. It sounded right, like an observation of, more or less, the same things she'd been seeing in past years. Twisted in a way that reflected his vision of the world, of course.

"There won't be peace until we can find a way to stop this," she said quietly. "You know that, though."

"I've never been much of a peacetime ruler," her grandfather said, his chest shaking as though he might like to chuckle but couldn't quite muster up the energy. "Fight your way through the trials and perhaps you'll have the opportunity to give it a try yourself, dearest."

"You don't think they'll let me win."

"Of course not. You'll die, and far more terribly than your mother, I daresay. I wonder if they'll keep me alive to watch, or if my knowledge of that will be enough of a punishment," he said, smiling thinly, no real sadness in his expression.

"But you hope…"

"Oh, as always, dearest, I hope to live to see what comes next."

He didn't.

It wasn't the Games, or the Trials, or whatever they were calling them.

The Mockingjay was set to execute him, and she was set to watch. A date was set, a mostly-constructed arena from the Gamemakers' lineup had been settled on, she was critically aware of all of it. As was he. They so badly wanted him to die helpless, hopeless, and he so adamantly refused.

Katniss Everdeen turned her arrow on the rebel President, and he died laughing.

It was what he would have wanted, she supposed. Though he would have been delighted by what followed, the coup by District 2's underground Center, the thousands of child soldiers who spilled into the streets, wiping out any rebel they encountered until the pavement was wet with blood and the candy-colored buildings were more red than anything.

Not that she was there for any of it. She had retreated into a wardrobe in a room that had once been her mothers, found a nest of silky dresses already assembled, settled down and waited to die, having had no idea what was happening in the chaos. It smelled like her mother's perfume. Not a hint of blood.

They found her after a day and a half of searching. An older woman in Peacekeeper's garb lifted her out of the wardrobe like a kitten. Offered her food and water. Her old room. She wasn't sure what had happened at all, wasn't sure what she wanted to have happened until the television came back to life and the announcement clarified, once and for all, the fate of the country,

A woman named Margaret Lancaster had ascended to the role of President. On the older side, very normal-looking. Marina had never seen this woman before in her life, but she had the mannerisms of a dozen Capitol politicians, the sureness of her voice and affect, the deceptively friendly smile, even though the look in her eyes was as haunted as that of most everyone she encountered outside of white armor.

The vast majority of the unnecessary functions of the country would be put on hold to ensure their collective continued survival.

This included the Capitol Trials, of course, and also the Hunger Games. What a relief that was, for as long as it lasted. She wondered if President Lancaster might be the one to do it, to conclude the seemingly endless cycle of killing. For a year, then for two years, no children died.

She returned to school, as much of a pariah as she'd expected. That was fine. She'd had a lot of time to read during her imprisonment, made excellent grades. Certainly no one was afraid of her, anymore. She was free to overachieve in peace.

The kind of peace one only encounters when all of one's relatives are dead or deserters.

It was fine. Really, really, really fine.

Two years later, they brought the Games back. That was, she thought, probably less fine, but it wasn't as though she had a role in the decision-making process. It was true, that unrest had spread in the Capitol, as so much of life returned to normal, other than that key component.

Perhaps they were difficult to control without a handful of victors to hero worship. Perhaps they were simply loathe to let the arenas already constructed go to waste. A former Gamemakers' apprentice, Chiron Rometo, was elevated to Head Gamemaker.

The rest were dead.

With the reimplementation of the Games, her family, among many others, returned home. What was left of them, of course. Hero, looking quieter, more anxious, and dramatically thinned-out. The rest of them nothing of the sort. Prepared to move into the President's mansion, since Lancaster seemed to have no interest in it, and it was technically under the family's stewardship.

That was how she learned of her grandfather's final gift to her.

Legally, by deserting, her family had forfeited any claim to the Snow family fortune.

She was the sole heir in his will, and the sole arbiter of his estate.

While she had never considered herself a vindictive person, never really considered herself angry at her family in particular, even as she watched the bay door of the last craft close, watched the thing disappear into the sky along with everyone she'd ever thought even _might _take care of her…

She ordered the mansion demolished.

Forfeited her apellido materno, enrolled in university as Marina Trevino. A different institution than her father's workplace at the time of his death.

And then she disappeared into academia, and for over a decade, she didn't look back.

No one had looked back for her as they'd fled the sinking ship, after all.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol (The 90th Hunger Games)

"How was the announcement received?" President Lancaster asked, looking as though she'd prefer not to know.

"In the Capitol? With general delight," she explained with a sigh. "As expected."

"And you have the -"

"Viewership and randomly sampled response information by district have been sent to your tablet, to peruse at your pleasure, Ms. President."

"And this is the right thing," the President said, with all the certainty of a child looking over the precipice of a particularly lofty diving board at an unfamiliar pool. "This is how we end them. For good."

"To the extent that I can be sure, yes," she replied.

President Lancaster put her head in her hands, propping her elbows on the desk.

"Why do you want to end them, Marina?"

There were a number of answers to that question, none of which she especially wanted to offer to the cagey President, who hated nothing more than anything that reminded her too excessively of her long-dead grandfather. Who seemed to remain, willfully or otherwise, ignorant of who she was.

She wanted a country free of corrective violence. She wanted to rule that country. Not Panem as it currently existed. A better one that she intended to build, a last fuck you to her grandfather. She'd always been better than him, she knew that. She liked to think that he knew that too. That he'd died knowing it.

At the same time, the things she wanted had become, quite involuntarily, tangled up in the people she cared about, now, because there were far more of those than she'd ever anticipated having. Saxaul, who doubted her so adamantly about this, who had once been the only person she could talk to. Who was still the only person who really seemed to understand the truth of her.

Even if he found the truth of what he saw repulsive, at times. That was understandable. So did she. She saw _him_ in the mirror, in her ambitions, in the echoes of her past, most horribly in Hero's face, as he'd grown up to look so much like his great uncle.

('Not what I'd call great', he liked to joke drily over a glass of wine.)

Poor Hero, who she'd roped into this so thoroughly. Who owed her so infinitely, as much for being the one he'd taken as for generously funding his education and offering him a substantial piece of the family fortune, once they'd managed to make up, years later.

Cora, who stuck with her so doggedly, who had grown into such a powerful ally in time, but who remained so profoundly hopeful about this whole thing, so willing to see the best in her, so insistent that this was something that could be fixed, a betrayal of the victors in her care that she could nonetheless come back from.

She wasn't so sure. But she appreciated the vote of confidence.

And Polly, of course, who came and went like an outdoor cat, but who seemed as hurt by this as anyone, despite her odd way of showing… well, anything.

"They're poison to this country," she replied, after a second's thought. "We need to get the poison out before the wound they've made can heal. And this, I believe, is how we finally prove… what they are."

The President nodded absently.

"Yes. I suppose so. Annia thought so too."

Her heart sank just slightly. This wasn't exactly an ideal time to have the President dwelling on the very-dead several-years-former Head Gamemaker. Not when she'd very recently elevated her own cousin to the position.

"Hero won't let us down," she said quickly. "I'm not concerned about our ability to follow through, Ms. President. What she believed in, it's what we believe in, too."

More or less.

"You had another reason to come and see me," the President sighed. "Please, out with it. I'm exhausted."

"The mentoring situation has been handled. My solution may be somewhat inelegant, but I believe it will accomplish both the primary objective of explicit equity and a secondary objective of reintroducing the idea of constructive unity within Panem."

"Your solution," the President clarified. "Which is…"

"Effectively, a lottery. One of the twelve most recent victors placed in each district. I've already assembled the list, but we'll make a bit of a pageant of the reveal."

The President, frowning, gestured out over her desk, summoning the list that Marina sent over from her own tablet with a flick of her fingers.

"Claudia in Two?" she asked.

"Luck of the draw," Marina said, shrugging.

"But luck had nothing to do with it."

"And the preservation of our collective peace of mind had everything to do with it," she explained.

The President sighed yet again.

"I can't hate her. Annia… what happened to her, that wasn't her intention, even if it was the effect."

Marina bit back a sigh of her own.

She had debated attempting to explain the severity of the Claudia situation to the President, but if the older woman couldn't fathom that Claudia had never acted out of anything other than self-interest with the context of _her best friend's death_, she'd certainly have no better luck convincing her that the pods beneath the Capitol had been activated on Claudia's orders. Which sounded more like a conspiracy theory than anything.

In fact, she had reason to expect that Claudia or her affiliates were involved in disseminating very similar theories in the districts and the Capitol alike. Without an ounce of credibility.

Making it that much harder for her to be taken seriously.

The same problem by a different name. Megalomaniacs clinging to power.

She hoped that Cora had the right idea about killing Claudia not being the answer. About her reflecting a cultural problem. She could solve a cultural problem without descending too much further into dramatic hypocrisy.

"I understand, Ms. President," she said, wishing she didn't.

"Any other news? The arena, is it ready? Should I pay it a visit?" the President asked, expression shockingly anxious.

"No news is good news," she said. "All is proceeding according to plan."

President Lancaster rested her head on her desk in earnest. It was increasingly easy to accept that her employer was ninety-two years old, approaching ninety-three. She was beginning to truly look it.

"They will end," the President said. "I keep my promises. Please, Marina, you must help me keep this promise."

She bowed deeply.

"It will be my privilege, Ms. President."

The enormous west-facing window was lit up with pink and gold as the sun set hazily over the Capitol's skyline. The infrastructure had healed, the last of the skyscrapers finally repanelled and returned to its former state. At long last, the city no longer bore the scars of the violence that had preceded them into power.

"Are you holding up, Marina?" the President asked, looking over at her, wrenching her gaze away from the sunset. President Lancaster had always seemed to have a bit of a thing about sunsets.

"As well as I can," she laughed.

"Your friends, the victors…"

"They're not pleased, but they'll come around once we end this. We just need to prove that we've acted out of necessity, and we have."

"That's always what it comes down to, isn't it?" the President said sadly. "What else can we do here?"

"We can't be anything more than what we are."

Nothing more, nothing less.

She reached up to roll the gold stem of her rose pin, battered, now, but still very much intact, between her fingers.

While there were parts of her she had managed to leave in the past, where they well and truly belonged, other pieces of herself defied all attempts at excision. Some of those parts, she knew, were monstrous. Capable, at least, of monstrous things.

"I need to make a few calls, get everything in order for the mentorship announcement," she informed the President, who nodded absently and waved her away, back to gazing out at the colors of the setting sun.

She hurried out into the darkened halls of the innocuous government building that had been restructured to house the Office of the Presidency. A staid sort of building, now, adjacent to the Training Center, a fixture of the Capitol's uptown sector.

With a swish-flick over her wrist device, she placed a call to Hero, who picked up immediately.

He looked utterly unhappy, sipping out of his rose-patterned teacup, making absolutely no effort to hide the fact that he was exhausted.

"Fucking hell, Marina," he sighed. "What is it now?"

"Just checking on you," she said.

"Oh, because my health is the biggest problem on your plate, I'm sure."

"Call it a pleasant distraction?"

"Fairly unpleasant, as distractions go."

"Saxaul is back in the Capitol as of last night," she observed. "Have you talked to him?"

"I would sooner pull out all of my fingernails than, as the Head _fucking _Gamemaker, make his life any more unpleasant."

"Be careful where you place those expertly timed profanities, Hero," she sighed. "Head Gamemaker. Someone could make an innuendo out of that, you know."

"Please don't remind me."

"Let me know once he gets in contact, okay? He's staying with Cora, I give it a week."

"A week? _Marina_. He's not going to talk to me."

"A week, Hero. Just call me when he does. And check your inbox, I'm sending you the mentor assignments and my thoughts on the matter. I heard we had some temperature control issues with the arena?"

"We're a year out. There's 'prepared' and then there's 'overprepared' and then there's 'pathological'. The techs are on it."

"I just want to be sure…"

"You can be sure. Are the mayors cooperating? That's more your angle than mine."

"So far, so good. Even Rhodes in Three is making it suspiciously easy on us. I'm flying out tomorrow to get the ball rolling in One. You'll be kept up to date, of course."

"Wow. Being Head Gamemaker is shockingly easy, what with you doing literally ninety percent of the work," he said drily.

"Yeah, welcome to hell, man, population you and me. It only gets harder from here."

"I'll be waiting on the edge of my seat," he said, taking another sip from his teacup. "Take care, Marina. I have things covered on my end. Just be smart on yours."

"You know me, Hero, I'm always smart."

"God help us all."

He hung up on her somewhat unceremoniously, which she supposed was to be expected. Hero had never managed large crowds especially well, tended to wall off like a turtle when faced with an audience larger than a dinner table. The announcement proceedings must have been exhausting for him. Perhaps not the ideal Head Gamemaker, but she absolutely didn't want to put herself in that role.

In recent years, if not long before, she'd learned a few valuable things about the consequences of visibility. The less visible she was, the more power she would have to spin any story that came of this into one that kept Hero slightly more alive than Annia.

As confident as she was in all of this, as much as she believed that she was doing exactly what needed to be done, there would always be a part of her that doubted these methods. A part that, speaking in the voice of a long-dead tyrant, warned her that violence irreversibly begot more violence, that her part in it would inevitably be punished just as his was, in the end.

Well, the blade of a guillotine hanging over _her _was nothing new.

One more year of this, and she would be able to protect herself, and the people she loved, for good.

If she didn't have that faith, she had nothing.

x

_Pro Patria Mori marches on! I have twelve submissions at the moment - you can view the list on my profile. While the 'deadline', as it were, is April 6th, I recommend that you drop me a tribute as soon as possible if you're looking to get a particular spot! At the moment I've only accepted a maximum of two submissions per person, but I'll expand that if things look sparse, as I'm really looking forward to getting this show on the road._

_Thanks, as always, for your following this, and for your kind comments! I know I write... a lot, but it's just kind of what you're signing up for, so be advised: while not universally 9k+ (there's a lot of backstory!), chapters will tend to be long!_


	4. Metacognition

Metacognition

x

If my body is a pitcher I fill and empty  
How strong do we need to be

'Executive Action', Nina Puro

x

Saxaul Eslami, District 7, Victor of the 84th Hunger Games

The knot in his throat, tightening progressively since he hauled his single duffel bag off the train the previous morning, had only grown as a second day passed in the Capitol.

He hadn't thought that it would be this difficult, coming back for good, without a clear escape hatch or a one-day timeline to make it bearable. He'd returned for their sort-of-weekly dinners, of course, but not for ceremonies, nothing to do with the Games. Despite all this, he'd made a good show of normalcy, he thought, spending the first night in the hotel, very conventional. Timothy seemed well, which was good. Had apparently gone on Intensive Care with Cora a few weeks back, another episode about alcoholism, managed to stay off it since then.

It was a marvel that the poor man was still alive.

That any of them were, if he thought about it for too long, but Timothy in particular had never really belonged in the world of victors. As though any of them had, as though it was something that someone could belong to rather than a delightful dead albatross that a subset of the population happened to treat like a medal. He tried to be kind, as best he could - they were the same age, had won in consecutive years, it was technically supposed to mean something.

Annoyingly enough, the _meanings_ to be found in almost everything to do with victory, when one squinted and pried off the obfuscating top layer of ceremony and decorum, were just… sad.

He was ready for something to not be fucking depressing for once.

That was how he ended up checking out of the hotel, his bag swung back on his shoulder, navigating through the neon-lit streets and glimmering sidewalks until he reached Cora's building.

After such a long absence, his key card no longer permitted him entry to any building he wished; he had to buzz her down to let him in, relieved, at least, to see that she was staying somewhere with decent security. Had apparently just gotten into the city herself, after missing the mentors' meeting.

Lucky her!

It started to rain as he waited - perfect, his hair was already a wreck.

She opened the door in a rush, pajama-clad and apologizing profusely (it wouldn't be Cora if she didn't greet him by apologizing for eighteen different things, none of which he gave a fuck about) and all he could do was hug her, breathe, try to pretend, as before, that this was just a normal meeting, just two friends brought back together by totally-not-war-crimes circumstances.

"Let me get your bag," she insisted. "Damn, what do you have in this thing?"

"Everything I own!" he said proudly, allowing her to take it, a little put out but willing to avoid an awkward argument on the doorstep.

Despite her complaint, she lifted it easily, balancing the whole thing on one shoulder as though it only weighed a few pounds. The perils of friendship with someone so demonstrably capable of breaking bones, whether or not she'd turned her talents elsewhere.

Even in what looked like house slippers, she was still a solid half a foot taller than him, which would have annoyed him more had it been anyone else. If he couldn't be six feet tall, _no one_ could be.

Cora got a pass, but she was on thin fucking ice, he was fond of reminding her.

"Planning on moving in?" she asked, as they took the elevator to the thirty-first floor.

"Depends. You got a free couch?"

"Always free for a friend. I've missed you."

"It's been two weeks," he laughed. "I was going to be back in town anyway for the dinner, even without all the other business."

"All the other business," she repeated, nodding vaguely. "I didn't make it to the mentors' meeting, you probably…"

"Noticed? Yeah, the ratio of murderous psychopaths to tolerable people was a little off, I _sort of noticed_. Don't worry, Polly flaked too."

"I didn't _flake_! We had to wrap filming in Two, I was busy. And, uh, also I didn't want to go," she admitted, a little sheepishly, taking his rain-soaked light jacket and hanging it up as they entered her apartment.

The kettle on her countertop was still steaming. She'd probably been making tea when he buzzed to be let in. She'd never been much the interior decorating sort, but he smiled to see that she'd at least hung a few pictures on the walls. It was a homey enough space, though sparsely furnished, despite his awareness that she'd lived in this particular apartment for nearly a year, now.

"Don't worry, you didn't miss much," he sighed, taking off his shoes at the door and throwing himself inelegantly onto her couch. "God, I just want to be laying down right now. You know what's fucking great? Laying down. Standing is bullshit. Walking? Worse bullshit. I want to be supine twenty-four-fucking-seven."

"That bad, huh?" she observed. "Can I make you some tea? Food? I have food."

"Tea would be awesome, actually, thanks."

As she poured from the kettle and rifled around for, presumably, something caffeinated, he inspected the pictures she'd chosen for her walls, not having visited her apartment specifically since her last move. There was a picture of her and the family of her three-years-dead district partner, taken at a site in District 7 that he recognized as a popular hiking destination in the public forests. One that included him, a photo taken over dinner with Hero, Marina, Polly, and Manari.

He sighed, accepting the steaming mug with a nod of gratitude.

Cora seated herself on the floor next to the couch, and he frowned, glancing around the room.

"How is it possible that you have _no chairs_ in here?"

"I don't do much entertaining on my own, lately. I'm never really home for long."

On closer inspection, she did look awfully tired, though she tended to be dark-circle-y even when she was well rested.

"You're valid."

"_You're_ valid!" she exclaimed.

"That's not true and you know it," he laughed, blowing over the surface of his tea to cool it. "I take it back. If you think anything about me is valid, you're _not _valid."

"I know, I know. Come on, I'm sure something happened at the meeting, tell me everything."

He did his best to do exactly that. Most of the observations likely wouldn't come as a surprise. Sequin was clearly stretched thin, willingly delegating the role of Corsage Supervisor to Finish - that was new. Finish's hair was stupid, which wasn't new at all. Cereus and Claudia continued to conspire, in their way, not that he could parse out exactly what _their _deal was, though he knew he didn't like it one bit. An remained snappy as ever, Sharon got more beautiful every day (he shoehorned this in because he knew it would make Cora blush), Timothy remained sober, so good for him.

"That's exciting," Cora interjected. "I think we had a really good talk when he came on Intensive Care. There's a lot to work through, there, but it was kind of cathartic, actually."

"I figure you've heard the rest, the announcement, all that stuff?" he sighed.

"Yeah," she said. "Hey, it could be a lot worse. It's exactly what she told us it would be. She's holding to it."

"Cora, I love you, but it could also be a lot fucking better."

He didn't like it at all, her running informal public relations for Marina, though with full sincerity, of course, completely believing her reassurances. He understood it, he supposed. She'd been through the wringer. Marina beat Claudia, at least as far as 'people worth trusting' went.

'Not trying actively to kill them or destroy them psychologically' was a step up from Claudia, so, well, low bar.

That wasn't very charitable of him. He regretted the thought almost instantly. The betrayal was the Games, the sheer uncharacteristic idiocy of the move. She was better than what she was a part of, or he had _believed _that she was better than… this, that she would be the person to protect them from the Games, from the horror of them.

It was a childish belief, and letting go of his faith in Marina had been… painful. Like forfeiting any childhood illusion about a just world. Just more proof that he'd never properly managed to grow up, he supposed. Three years spent trying to make up for it.

"You're right," Cora said, almost immediately, not really giving him too much time to dwell on it. He was grateful for that. "But that's for us, the fixing. We can fix things!"

"That's the dream," he said, trying not to sound too glum, since it usually worried her.

"I hear that you're… doing something," she said, a little hesitantly. "And you don't have to tell me anything if you don't want, obviously, so just tell me to fuck off if it's invasive, or, really, if it's something that needs to be kept secret, especially from Marina, because I'd definitely tell her, you know."

He laughed aloud.

"She definitely already knows. You know the election this coming year?"

Parliament, not the Presidency. That one rolled around on the decade, while Parliamentary seats were decided every two years.

"Not really," she admitted. "It's far away. Practically as far off as the… the Games. But is that…"

"Yeah," he said, swallowing over the words before he voiced them aloud. "Um. I've got the papers done up. I'm running."

A beat passed between them.

"Hey," she said. "That's really awesome, Saxaul, you're gonna be great."

"...but?"

"Aren't you going to die? With the mentoring thing, all the… that's a lot of things to do at once."

"I've done a lot of things at once before," he said, trying not to let defensiveness color his tone. "And look. If we want anything done right, any of this, we're going to have to do it ourselves. It's the only way I can think of, though if you've got some great alternative, be my guest. People are getting lined up to die as we fucking speak and no one is _doing anything _about it."

She held up her palms, a gesture of surrender.

"No, I get it, and you're right. I'll vote for you! How are you… what's the process? What's the deal? Can I help?"

He sighed, reaching down to take her hand.

"Well, I'm the Oppositionist Party candidate for Sector Eighteen, if you know what that means at all."

"Oh! You have a party and everything! Ah. Yeah, no, I don't know what that means beyond the general gist of it, but I'm… in favor of it!"

The whole thing was the product of several months of work. He'd gotten Manari on board, the young man having spent the last few years becoming everything short of a politician himself in a way that Saxaul absolutely was not. While they certainly hadn't gotten along as easily as he did with other survivors of the 89th Games (which was to say, the present company), the progress they'd made had yielded a grudging sort of respect.

"You're not doing this whole thing alone, right?" Cora asked, abruptly sounding very anxious. "I'm serious, if you need help…"

"Save an ad spot during Intensive Care for me," he suggested. "Seriously. I've got people."

Well, person, for now.

"Manari," she guessed. "I _knew_ he wasn't in Seven for some kind of cultural tour!"

He laughed at the idea.

"No, he mostly reads, acts as an intermediary with Hero while pretending that's not his source of information, and makes incisive comments about my lifestyle."

"Oh, he's really good at that last one," Cora observed, biting back a laugh.

"What's there to criticize _you _about?"

"What isn't there? Have you met me?" she sighed.

"Don't you go down that route," he said warningly. "He's been really helpful, sorted through a lot of metrics by sector to figure out where I had a shot, made an excellent go-between with the Oppositionist leaders… they only needed minimal selling, which was… really surprising."

"Surprising? You're the best at, like,_ opposing_. Of course they'd want you on their team," Cora said, rolling over slightly to offer him an upside-down grin.

"It's really weird," he admitted. "I've never even… it was never an option. Even now, it kind of feels like I'm playing dress-up or some shit. You know I'm running for _Cornelia Wiltshire's_ old seat?"

"...who?"

"Oh, Marina's old employer. Her local demographic was the most willing to elect a seditious idiot with tenuous claim to even run for the position, per Manari's tireless research. But it's weird. She did a lot of good shit. Big shoes."

"You're not…"

"I _definitely_ am. Manari keeps me humble."

"Dunno if I'd go that far," Cora laughed. "Is 'humble' in your range?"

"Nothing's _out of my range_!" he insisted, then chuckled.

"Definitely not dramatic irony, huh?"

"Fuck off."

"I'd be happy to, but I worry you'd get lonely," she replied with a smile. "Glad someone's hanging out with Manari, too."

"Speaking of people who got scooped out of the arena with you…"

"Yuna's still not public, but we flew an old friend of hers in a few months ago. Things have been getting better since then. Sort of. I mean. I killed her. Hard to shake off."

They couldn't exactly discuss this sort of thing at the victors' dinners. Certain people's continued living existence remained on a need-to-know basis. It was all very convoluted, the job of sorting out who had been or could be told what.

"Hey," he said, not wanting to think about the intricacies of… well, anything… anymore. "Want to see something my sister showed me?"

"Nyssa?" Cora said expectantly. "Yeah, show me, come on."

"Okay. I'm not as good at telling it as she is, but watch."

He shifted to a sitting position on the couch, ushering her up to join him.

"I'm watching."

"Suppose someday you meet someone very evil, possibly an evil prince - I don't know where she got the monarchy angle, don't ask - and they demand that you swear fealty by kissing their hand."

"Fealty?"

"Yes. Fealty."

"No one's ever asked me to swear fealty to anything."

"Imagine, okay? _Suppose_."

"Fine, I'm supposing. How am I going to get out of swearing fealty? There must be a trick," she said willingly, nodding along.

"Watch."

He extended his hand, twining his fingers with hers.

"So, they take your hand like this, and they demand that you bow and kiss their hand, because that's how fealty works."

"Obviously."

"And then…" he leaned in, smiling as she flinched, so much less, now, than she had in the first few months after she left the arena when anyone got too close.

Without breaking eye contact, he kissed his own fingers.

"See, then it doesn't count!" he insisted as she laughed and took her hand back, shoving him playfully, though with enough muscle behind the blow to knock the wind out of him. "No fealty! Because you didn't kiss them. Cora, c'mon, isn't that a great trick? Tell me you can't find a way to use that!"

"When am I… what… _so_ many questions. How did Nyssa pick that up? When did she meet an evil prince or whatever and have to figure that out?"

"She's a great creative mind, like her brother," he sniffed, feigning offense.

"Do you hear yourself? Can you _hear _the things you say?" Cora exclaimed, through another peal of laughter.

"Of course, I'm brilliant and hilarious and it's all very deliberate."

"I've really missed you," she said. "I'm glad you're here. And you, uh, you sound like _you_. Everyone had me worried."

"By 'everyone', you mean 'Marina'."

"No, I mean everyone. Even Sharon's worried about you, a little, at least, people… care about you, it's not just me, and it's _definitely _not just Marina, even though she probably misses you more than I do."

"Is Hero…"

"Agonizing constantly about everything, utterly unchanged every time I see him."

"...by 'everything', do you mean…"

"_I don't mean 'Marina'_!" she huffed, sounding just a little exasperated with him. "You're the one who keeps bringing her up."

Her television lit up abruptly, beginning to glow pink and hum.

"Speak of the devil," he observed.

"You stop that," she said reproachfully. "It's her line to the victors. How come your tablet's not humming?"

"It's been dead for days."

"_Saxaul_! Take care of yourself, please!"

"I'll start when _you_ start," he shot back, and she sighed, gesturing open the message with a flick of her wrist that conveyed slightly more attitude than usual.

Rather than responding with some cutting remark - he could imagine a few that might work - she frowned at the message displayed onscreen, shook her head like she couldn't quite believe what she was reading.

"We're getting … different districts?"

"Scoot, let me see!" he complained.

"No," she said vaguely, though she gave him her spot on the couch, standing as though to get a better look. "A lottery? Saxaul! There's a list attached! We all get our own districts to mentor!"

He inspected the message closely himself.

"Randomly assigned," he said, grimacing. "A _bold_ lie. If there's another goddamned ceremony..."

"Are you done reading? I want to see the list."

She was rocking on the balls of her feet, now, looking almost excited. It took a second, but he got it. For practically the last two years, she'd been worrying about mentoring at Claudia's side, what that would look like, what it would mean for someone whose identity was already so inextricably wrapped up in District 2. He could hardly blame her. Even _his _complicated (read: two stabbing attempts) history with the senior mentor looked like nothing compared to the mess she'd made of Cora.

Not that there was anything wrong with her, but even three years later, the brush strokes of something terrible remained visible. Her worry hadn't been at all unfounded. This must be a relief.

He was grateful to Marina for that, at least.

"Of course, let's see the list," he sighed, fighting to muster up the same positive energy that he'd been able to harness a few minutes earlier.

As she deftly flicked open the accompanying message, he couldn't help but search for District Seven's assignment immediately. Not as though district loyalty had ever done him or anyone any good - that was one of the things he knew that he and Marina still agreed about, what a shitshow the social mechanics to enforce arbitrary borders were and had been and would continue to be until someone did something about it.

This would have made sense as a step, in a kind of messy way, if it hadn't been for such an awful purpose. Taking a moral stance on district nationalism while essentially executing twenty-three kids…

An would be taking his place in District 7.

He frowned.

Odd choice, but okay. He had nothing in particular against the severe victor from District 6, knew her to be reasonably fair and competent as well, often brutally so.

"I got District Six!" Cora read off the screen, literally hopping, now, with excitement. "Oh man! Wow! My own… oh no…"

She slowed after a second, and he crossed his arms, waiting for it to sink in.

"Oh," she murmured. "I think I have to sit down."

"Take your time," he said, glancing back at the list, starting from the top, though he felt his attention drifting to familiar names.

Timothy in One, a shitshow waiting to happen. Maybe that was the goal? The least apt mentor placed in one of the most viciously competitive districts.

"Wait. I'm in _Four_?"

What?

"...is that good?" Cora asked weakly. "Oh no. When do we meet them?"

"I… I don't know," he said, squinting as though that would clarify the significance of the decision on, no doubt, Marina's part.

Claudia, of course, was still in Two. As though she could be pried away from her district's Center, from her comfortable role in the context of the Games, without the aid of several tons of napalm.

"Well, it's probably… not the district that's going to need the most help?" Cora suggested. "Since you'll be busy, you know, with your campaign."

He ran his hand through his hair, forming a fist at the nape of his neck, closing his eyes, just trying to think, damn it, what did it _mean_?

It worried him, almost, how quickly his thoughts turned skeptical.

Was that really _him_, the impulse to treat the decision as a slight? As though he couldn't mentor tributes who truly needed the help. (_As though ability to send children to slaughter with particular panache was a viable measure of a person's character in some way_, he reminded himself.) But it was a vicious blow, really, all of this, the whole situation, that sent him stumbling back three years into the past, watching Oliver die first at the Cornucopia, his heart sinking despite how hard he'd fought to prepare himself, how he'd tried to make the last night survivable for him, Fidan, god, watching Fidan die, after three weeks of watching her live, after everything he'd done to try to help her, everything he did every fucking year, over and over again, never making any difference…

"Fuck," he sighed. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"Fuck," Cora agreed, her voice cracking like she might cry.

He looked up in alarm to see her with her chin tucked to her knees, staring up at the still-pulsing-pink screen.

"I thought I'd come to terms with it," she said quietly. "But Claudia's gonna have two more. Just like me and Marcus. And I'm. _I'm not good at this_. I don't know how to be good at this. What… what could she do, could she… my… I'm going to be responsible for them, two whole people, I can barely…. I can barely be responsible for _myself_… they're going to die."

There were no comforting words forthcoming.

Vividly, he had the sense that more or less the same knot of confused guilt must be coiling in each of their throats.

"Yeah," he said. "They're going to die."

"What's it like?" she asked, looking up at him, surprisingly small for such a disconcertingly tall woman. "You've done it before, it's… do you get… what happens?"

"I don't know what it'll be like this year," he conceded, sitting down beside her and laying a comforting arm over her shoulders. "But every year it's… exactly what you expect. Two people who don't deserve what's about to happen to them. And then you try to convince them to kill the other kids, who also don't deserve it. Try to tell them it'll be okay. And you're with them for a week, and it's enough of a… it's so destabilizing that you can't _not_ bond with them, usually, you're _all they have_, and that feels so fucking _real_ and even if you promise yourself it won't consume you this year, it always does. And you'd do anything for them. Even though the best you can offer them is the worst of what happened to you."

"You … Saxaul, you must have been the best mentor."

"Didn't make them any less dead."

Not Fidan, not Oliver. Not Bret and Lyrata, Etzy and William, Shajara and Naeem, Yoneq and Rowan… and that was just his district. Technically his responsibility. Hundreds dead since the Mockingjay Rebellion alone, so many of them out of reach of his help, as though he had anything to offer them.

"It's not for a year," Cora said softly, leaning into his arms. "What if we can stop it. We can… we can stop it. We can... blow up a building, maybe? I bet Polly would help. She likes that sort of thing."

"Because our being branded terrorists will help everyone so much," he sighed. "I'm just going to run for a stupid seat in fucking Parliament. And that's going to be great. And everyone's going to take me _so seriously_. And I'll do something meaningful. Because that's how politics works."

"You don't have to do it, you know."

"Yeah, I do."

"How come?"

"No one else is doing anything that's going to fucking work. I can't… I can't have another year of feeling helpless. There's only so much I've ever been able to do for them, and it's all been so fucking useless. I just want something I do to fucking _matter_. There's no point in being the last person who waters the saplings before they cut them down. Over and over and over again. It's hell on earth, Cora."

And every time he'd tried to make it better, things had only gotten worse. His brilliant plan with Niagara, oh, they were clever alright, it was so fucking clever of him to try the media, drag her into it, along with him… all these _brilliant_, creative plans.

All these dead friends.

He held her closer. Wondered why he wasn't crying. He usually was by this point in the process of thinking too closely about the role he played in the context of society. How useless he really was, how it really _was _for the best that the reason he'd recognize half of Parliament, if he even got the seat, 'sure thing' or not, would be from fucking them.

And wouldn't that be powerful incentive to keep him out?

How all his tributes had died anyway. How Niagara had died anyway. None of it had mattered. All of it washed away in a hot shower, anyway. All the death, all the blood, all the everything else. And it was just him, in the end, clean and true and his own kind of disgusting.

"Hey, uh," he said quietly. "Don't let me… make this harder for you. You _can_ make it better for them. You'll be a great mentor. It matters, when someone cares about you. These idiot kids are going to need someone to look out for them, and you know - jeez, you know better than anyone, it matters that it's _you_ rather than _Claudia_, right?"

She nodded mutely, seemingly past words.

"It's not… it's not hopeless," he said, though the words felt like ashes on his tongue.

That was the least he could do, right? Dial back the honesty. Protect someone, just a bit, from the pain of anticipating what was coming. Something terrible _was _coming. A flood of something-terribles.

All of his plans felt about as substantial a protective force as a dam made of toothpicks.

"It's not hopeless," she finally whispered, echoing back his words. "It'll be the last time, and we'll make sure of it. I'll do… not just me. _We'll_ do what needs to be done. You and me and everyone else. We can fix this. I know we can."

He hoped Marina realized what the fuck she was doing. What she'd agreed to, what the coming year was going to do to all of them. Inevitably.

It was funny, almost, that Nyssa was the one who'd come up with the seemingly nonsensical advice, the twined fingers and the perfidious kiss. She'd always been just an ounce more sensible, just slightly more _reliable _than he was, which seemed like a small distinction in theory, but had clearly brought them to massively different places in life.

The thing was, if there was anything he'd ever been good at, it was kissing without swearing over an ounce of fealty, or anything else, for that matter. Leveraging some kind of… some kind of something-wrong-with-him for a shot at helping someone else. Even if it hadn't worked so far. Perhaps he'd been playing the wrong game.

In the arms of his friend, he took a deep, shuddering breath, and thought… _well, we'll do what needs to be done_.

His tea had grown cold where he'd left it, on the little end table beside the couch. Cora coughed awkwardly, drying her eyes and straightening her hair.

"So, I guess we should talk strategy, then," she said, seemingly aiming for a 'conversational' tone, barely landing a notch better than 'stricken'.

He could have laughed.

"I was thinking I might get really, really drunk and do a marathon rewatch of Game of Love. Just for tonight, you know. Before we actually face the real world."

And the things they would have to do in it if they wanted to make a difference for anyone.

"Sounds good to me," Cora said, smiling sadly. "Just like old times."

"Old times? Christ, you're twenty-one, shut up," he sighed, finally getting a sincere laugh out of her, startled though she seemed to be.

"Shut up? I'm not the one who's been monologuing tonight."

"I said what I said," he insisted, leaning on her shoulder and taking a long drink of room-temperature tea.

Cora waved away the list, the message, the reminder from her television that the missive required a response within twenty-four hours to confirm that she'd received it. For a second, it really could have been that almost-a-year after the 89th Games, when they believed it was over and they were free.

What a stupid thought, that they could ever be free. When all of them, save for poor Timothy, of course, had a body count on their shoulders just for the privilege of continued life. They couldn't be free of that, and they couldn't be free of the Games. That was just the contract. Signed, yes, but also _drenched_ in blood.

For the moment, the best they could do was open a bottle of tequila together and pretend, for a few hours, that it wasn't happening, that the world wasn't waiting for them outside of the sparse but cosy shelter of Cora's living room.

And really, it almost worked.

Just like old times.

x

_Delightfully enough, we are up to fourteen tributes! I'll post One's introductions within the next three days, and hopefully by then I'll have a pair of Twos. The form remains on my profile, and if you have questions, or submissions, my inbox remains open. :)_


	5. Schismatic Movement (or, District 1)

Schismatic Movement (or, District 1)

x

It is either the beginning or the end  
of the world, and the choice is ourselves  
or nothing.

'Ourselves or Nothing', Carolyn Forché

x

Vermeil Caine, District 1

Outside of contractually obligatory sparring and some basic physical maintenance, I haven't done much at the Center, lately. Nothing beyond the commitments of a failed recruit, though 'failure' is a kinda harsh word for it.

It's just a question of whether a person makes the cut or not, and I just didn't. During the 89th Games, though unrelated to the events of them… probably?… my parents' divorce was finalized, and in the aftermath, with all that crazy bullshit with the new victor, then the tour, the hiatus coming out of nowhere, everything was thrown into disarray.

I've never been the guy to come to for a level head in a chaotic situation, or like, in general, really.

So it made sense, it wasn't unfair, or anything. My scores on some exam or screening were too low, or too high, or too indicative of sociopathy. They look for fundamentally stable, _reliable_ types, these days. Or so it seems, anyway, if our standing volunteers for this year… my year… are any indication.

That's not exactly my vibe.

And contracts with the Center don't expire until five years past being cut, so it was probably for the best, anyway, that I ended up on the path out of here so soon. For the last three years - give or take a handful of months - they've called me in when needed. A sparring partner for the recruits in the running. It's pretty much the easiest job on the list, when they basically own my ass, could have me cleaning floors all day if they wanted. And I get swipe access to the gym, though not when they've got a class in session.

Small mercies, since the Center is kind of on the downswing, what with first the hiatus and then the finale being announced two nights ago. It's the talk of District 1, even in school, so I've enjoyed having a close eye on the action periodically.

I haven't been called in today.

The woman who typically makes the decisions, one of our three victors, Sequin Singson, isn't even in the Center. Most of the competitive element grinds to a halt in her absence, and she's been out-of-district frequently for the past year. Not a bad thing. Less distraction from school on my part, frankly. When I walked in this morning, the combat area was fully vacant, the muffled sounds of music and machinery wafting in from the gym. A conditioning class, from the sounds of it. Attendance mandatory, back in the day.

So I'll have the place to myself, then.

I can't really put my finger on why that's appealing enough to counterbalance the obvious risk, just of being in here when I'm not supposed to be. Years of conditioning to fear stepping out of line should be enough. They used to be enough.

I'm not sure what changed. Something did. Recently, too, or I'd have done this ages ago. It can't just have been the announcement, though that can't hurt, either. One last Games, if the Capitol is to be believed.

One last chance to… I don't know.

The rack of weapons has always been tempting. I'm not exactly careful about heading over, looking it up and down in a way I never have, even as a trainee. It was always so supervised, becoming less so as I reached the end of my tenure, only to be cut before the real business of it began.

(Maybe for the best?)

I can't bring myself to stare for too long. There's a handsome balisong in a subsection of various ornate and simple switchblades. After a moment's consideration, I take it, feel the weight of the hefty gold-plated handle, shaped like the head of a coyote. Slip it into my pocket.

Almost immediately, I realize that I've made a larger mistake than I'd expected. It's not like I'm here to _steal_, though I guess I sort of just did, but it does sort of occur to me that… well. I _kind of_ just stole something, and there's definitely some kind of weight sensor beneath the thin plastic web holding the assortment of blades in place, and it's definitely pulsing gently with white light, and I _definitely_ knew this about the weapons rack, but wasn't…

I've been out of sorts for a few weeks, now, but this is just dumb.

Sighing at myself more than anything, I immediately make things much worse by grabbing three more knives, one of which is another switchblade, one hunting knife that I shove into the waistband of my jeans, and a push dagger that I shuffle into my sneaker.

Someone has definitely been alerted.

I wonder what's going to happen next. My heartbeat is already practically audible. It's not going to be Sequin, since she's off in District 3 or something.

Peacekeepers? Some other instructor?

I climb onto the combat plinth, sit, and wait. Not understanding, really, why this isn't horrifying me. It should horrify me, I know that, but instead, I feel the blade of the hunting knife, sharpened to an impossible finish, digging just slightly into my hip. And I lean into it, not away, into the hot wetness of blood already welling up in the deepening cut.

This is all just a little bit new. Like, I've never… I mean, sort of, I guess, it's familiar, the sheer _desire_ of it all, wanting so badly to… but I don't actually do it. It's never been such a profound need to get the best of someone, to flout the rules or whatever, that I can't bite it back, nod away the twinge of an unpleasant urge to… escalate, when my mother raises her voice, or an opportunity presents itself, an unguarded balisong on a silver fucking platter, I know not to...

In some ways, I think I know exactly what I want.

And then I hear someone enter the high-ceilinged central chamber, and I have yet another great idea about how I'm going to get it.

"Sticky fingers," our youngest victor, Corsage Perrier, says warningly, striding towards the plinth with the air of someone interrupted from, perhaps, a pleasant nap. He's not especially tall or imposing, blond and classically handsome, not too much older than I am, really. "Couldn't wait, huh? Intensive Care is on, I'm missing my favorite part. Who even are you?"

While he's not too extensively involved in training, always keeping a wary distance from Sequin, he shows up for sparring matches reliably. I know him from the crowd, watching eagerly as others spill blood in a way he can't.

Often my blood.

"You… might not know who I am, but I know who you are," I say, trying not to sound like I came up with the sentence thirty seconds prior and have been practicing it in my head ever since, mostly ignoring what he actually said.

"No fucking shit, everyone knows who I am," he sighs. "Come on, down you go."

"I want to talk to you."

"About the thievery or the breaking and entering?"

"I'm… Vermeil?" I say, wincing as my name comes out more like a question. "I… I'm still contracted here."

"That doesn't complicate the whole 'theft' deal as much as you might think it does."

"I want to volunteer," I blurt, poorly-timed, I guess, since it seems to catch him off balance, and wait for him to scoff or tell me that I can't, wondering what will happen after that.

I'm already on the combat plinth, after all. The thought makes my pulse quicken. Someone will have to come and get me off of this thing. _Something_ will happen. Oh, yes. I definitely want something to happen.

Instead of going in any of the directions I'd have expected, though, he frowns, just a little.

"Now, why would you want to do something like that?"

The past few days seem to bubble to the surface, unbidden.

"I just had this _moment_, it was like… a completely stupid thing, like, totally mundane, but I had this realization that -"

"Oh my god, _please_, spare me the details, _fuck_."

He sighs dramatically, vaulting over the boundary of the combat plinth with the grace of a gymnast. Corsage has always been disorienting like that, even as a senior student, I remember, before he volunteered. He's not the biggest or the most assuming person ever to have been churned out by the Center, but he's one of those obnoxious types who's always had a knack for it.

"Did you make it to your kill test, at least?" he asks, rounding on me and crossing his arms. "Before you got axed, I mean."

I didn't. That starts at fifteen, yes, but I was cut at fifteen, probably a few weeks short of it.

"No," I say, aware of, and not exactly thrilled by, the consequences of lying to a mentor.

Not the exciting type of consequences. Mundane and unpleasant ones, like being demoted out of combat and into janitorial work.

My contract calls for two more years, here, that he's in a very good position to make miserable. Surprisingly, though, at my response, he makes yet another almost cartoonishly disappointed noise, breaching the distance between us, alarmingly close to me, now, his blue eyes leveled with mine.

"Well _christ_, then, how the fuck do you _know_ you want to kill people? It's different shit than stealing a few knives, you know."

I blink.

How _do_ I know?

I didn't exactly think I'd get this far. Definitely not with Sequin, who would have probably kicked me out of her office for wasting her time, hell, ended my contract and had me carted off by Peacekeepers if she was annoyed enough. Stolen-knife or not. That was, I think, what I expected. Though I'm not, like, sure anymore. What I expect. From myself any more than anyone.

Still making eye contact, squinting slightly like he's waiting to see how my pupils dilate or some shit in response to the question, Corsage edges even closer.

I can practically hear his heart beating, see it in the artery in the side of his neck, buried under tissue, but we're taught exactly where it is.

For a second longer, I hesitate.

Then I reach out and dig my nails into his neck, at the pulse point.

It's not exactly fair, since he can't do much to stop me. Everyone knows Corsage has a chip in the base of his skull, after he won, what with… well, the way he won. No matter what the fuck is wrong with me, I know he is, or, was? Well, is, I guess, pretty clearly, a special kind of fucked up.

But he can't hurt people. That's the deal with the chip. The whispers about it died down, more or less, a few months after his triumphant return, as more interesting news came and went, but no one's totally forgotten, and occasionally he and Sequin will have the sort of high-volume argument that ends with her backhanding him across the room. Never the other way around.

I don't think anyone's been desperate to test its efficacy, but it's not like anyone's turned up mutilated since he's been back.

And now his blood is running down my hands, hot and wet and immediate in response to the sensation of flesh, stretching, tearing along the crescent-moon lines of my fingernails.

I have to fight back a strangled gasp of… something.

He… oddly… laughs in delight, cracks his knuckles.

"Perfect," he says, then takes me by the upper arm, flips me, and hurls me bodily to the plastic-y white surface of the plinth.

A spray of his blood follows me down, landing with a delicate rhythm around me as I hit the ground with bruising force. But I realize, abruptly, that I can't stop smiling either, even as he takes me by the collar of my shirt and hauls me to my feet, his neck still oozing blood.

I must not have quite dug deep enough to really damage the artery.

He's smiling too, though I imagine I must look far more elated than he does, dangling by my neck, utterly at his mercy.

Corsage has no sense of mercy. Everyone knows that.

My heartrate climbs. I try, to no avail, to ease off on grinning.

"You're a weird motherfucker, aren't you, Vermeil," he says, tightening his grip on my neck. "How'd you get cut, huh?"

"Tested out," I choke. "Onto … other things."

"But you still want to volunteer."

"Y-yes."

"And you want to do something worth watching. Not just this kind of idiot bullshit."

"_Yes_," I say, with far more certainty, even as his grip grows progressively more restrictive and the supply of blood to my brain is entirely cut off.

It's the best I've felt all week.

The most right, at least. Inches from death.

I want to look him in the eye, before he does it, but I can't stop looking at the blood. All the blood. He's made no effort to stanch the bleeding. It doesn't seem to bother him at all, save for the sort of modified grip he's using to hold me up without engaging his left side, the torn-up one.

"God," he says, at last letting me fall backwards, seeing stars, unable to throw my hand back to catch myself. "Sequin may just fucking kill me."

Then he laughs, far more earnestly than before, kneels beside me and picks my head up, from where I lay, too dizzy and disoriented to react much.

"I need a favor, and you seem to like blood _so_ much," Corsage adds, shifting his still-bleeding neck and watchin my gaze follow the movement with a smirk. "Are you gonna cooperate?"

I nod, some of my motor control rushing back. Prop myself up until I'm sitting, at least sort of, on my own.

"We've got some Capitol woman showing up this afternoon. Based on what I've heard from Sequin, I'm willing to bet that she'll like… well, the idea of you. If I can handle that for you, I'm gonna want something in return."

"Yes."

"Kind of a broken record, huh?"

"...would you prefer 'yes, _sir_'?" I say sharply, some of my old sense of myself pulsing back into my body as the feeling returns to my appendages.

"Hm."

In the second that he pauses, seemingly to seriously consider the idea, I pull myself to my feet. Take the stolen knife from my pocket, flip open the blade, and swing it, aiming for his heart.

He catches me by the wrist.

"Y'know, I don't think I do. Seems kinda disingenuous with the level of respect going on here."

With a cruel twist, the knife falls out of my hand.

"Drop the other knives," he advises me. "You're not gonna be the motherfucker who kills me, Vermeil, I can tell you that right now."

I nod, taking both of the other blades from where I've concealed them, one biting into the flesh of my waist after being tossed around so badly, letting them clatter to the surface of the combat plinth.

"How did you…" I finally ask, looking down at my throbbing wrist, the contradiction of his easy responses to my attacks post-throat-gouge and the hypothetical behavioral modification chip finally striking me at full force. "How are you doing this?"

"Loophole when my life's in danger. One of a few I've found. You're gonna help me cut the fucking thread, though."

I blink. His smile doesn't waver.

"Come on. Step into my office. We got a lot to talk about, and if we're lucky, we can catch the final sum-up. It's reruns, but it's one of my favorites. Motorcycle crash. Lots of interesting things to learn about skulls. I think we can help each other, Veneer."

"Vermeil."

"Close enough," he says, a little dismissively, gesturing me down from the plinth.

He hasn't checked the rack to see what I actually took. I know that because, as I climb down after him, I nick my heel on the push dagger still concealed in my shoe.

It stabs just slightly into the meat of my foot with every step as I follow him to the offices adjacent to the main chambers, leaving behind a mess of blood and three out of four blades. It all smells so headily of iron. Corsage still hasn't cleaned up the drying mess of red that's beginning to tangle and dry in his hair.

Somehow, everything is falling into place.

x

Neroli Qayyum, District 1

"Square your hips, feet parallel, and thrust! Twelve thrusts… eleven…"

"Neroli," Cabernet whispers from the pad beside me, the loaded barbell resting on his hips rising and falling in unison with mine, and with the rest of this particular jam-packed chamber of the gym. "Hey. Neroli. This doing anything for you?"

He nods at his excessively rolling hip thrusts, grinning back at me when I roll my eyes.

"I'll kick your _ass_, Cab," I complain, huffing out a breath to keep my hair from clinging to the sheen of sweat on my face. "I just went up a plate. Don't distract me."

Fittingly, Linda, the conditioning instructor who's been deputized for Sequin's absence this particular week, sees him being excessively wiggly and strides over to chew him out with threats of a dislocated hip, a broken bone, a torn ligament, disqualification from volunteering in the grand finale. By the time we collectively finish the set, she's taken two plates from his barbell as a sort of punishment, her impressive biceps rippling as she easily hefts a forty-five pound plate in each hand and continues to call out our count.

As serious as she her threats sound, it's pretty obvious how much everyone believes that this year will actually be the end of the Games, which is to say, not at all. While it may be a special moment, like a quell, a place in some history book regardless of the outcome, it's not as though Cab would be forfeiting some particularly high honor if he did tear a muscle or something. It's not going to be the last one.

Everyone's pretty much on the same page about that. Recruitment hasn't slowed down even slightly. About a quarter of the other trainees in the massive chamber are still giggly little kids, playing at how quickly they can jerk their hips into the air since they're too small for weights.

Linda announces a water break, and I roll over, hefting the padded barbell from my hips, grabbing my bottle, and facing Cabernet. He's looking sulky, his typically lively green eyes clouded with something inscrutable.

"You got anything else you want to say?" I needle him.

"I think I made my point," he says, mustering up a grin.

Cab's always taken criticism to heart. Sequin knows to be gentle with him, by now, that for all his antics, he really isn't trying to get himself cut, knows to shape up quickly with only a subtle correction. And he really _is _capable of doing things right - that's a whole thing with him. Linda apparently missed the memo.

"Aw, I'm a little impressed," I say. "Hey, you managed to attract _Linda_ from all the way across the room. Hypnotic power, great responsibility, you know the drill."

"Lay off," he says, his smile taking on a far more familiar shape.

No one's saying it out loud just yet, but like, after about a decade in the Center, there are some things you can _know_. Like how you can always tell if Sequin's going to be amenable to joking or not based on whether Corsage is within earshot. The same way we knew it was going to be Manari and Jewel long before it was actually confirmed, well over three years ago, now, in advance of the last Games.

It's going to be me and Cab, and we're going to have to get used to that.

Sequin's alluded to as much, and since then, I've actually been making an effort to get to know him, to take him seriously, since clearly there's something about him worth taking at more than face value if Sequin thinks for even a second that he could make it as a volunteer. He doesn't really run in my circles, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but has required some getting used to.

"What are you getting up to tonight?" he asks, taking a long drink from his water bottle.

"Schoolwork," I say, very honestly, and he sighs as though he's disappointed in me. "Family dinner."

"Ew." He wrinkles his nose at the thought. "Sounds horrible. Come on, Friday night and you're staying in?"

"My sister's coming over," I complain. "That's not horrible."

"Isn't it, though? You're so boring. I can't believe Sequin's literally going to send me into the Games with you to make you look less boring."

"I'm not…"

"Party tonight, Pixane's parents' hotel, there's supposed to be a bunch of Capitol tourists there and we've got a bet going about who can get the most free drinks off them," he suggests. "I'm about to kill it, you could be my sober witness!"

"Just be careful, Cab," I sigh.

"The carefulest."

The thing is, despite his front, he actually will be. As I've gotten to know him, I've learned that he thinks things over far more deeply than he'd like people to believe. Lives in his head just as much if not more than I do. He's a good guy, if a little caught up in the more superficial parts of the culture surrounding training in One.

I've been grateful to have stayed out of that stuff. I'm no smooth operator. Half the cuts to the lineup this late in the game, just a year left to go, have something to do with some social mishap that snowballs into missed days, poor performance, cracks in the veneer that we really have to keep up, to prove to Sequin more than anyone else that we _can_.

And I can. Do what's called for. Really well, too, I'm like, good at it.

But there're plenty of things I'm not good at, and what Cabernet is suggesting sounds like a delightful combination of _all of them_.

Not liking crowds, so long as I can get over my discomfort in the close-confines of group training, like today, is seriously the opposite of a problem in an arena with twenty-four people, particularly when the whole point is basically to reduce that number as much as possible, if you want to get clinical about it.

"Just know you're invited, okay?" he reminds me, shifting back into place and gearing up for the next few sets as Linda reassumes her position at the front of the room and claps twice, calling us to order.

It's nice to be included. That's been a surprising aspect of my mission to become friends-ish with Cab. Sequin has almost certainly put him on the same path, and he's really trying to find common ground. As I continue to tuck and thrust in time with Linda's orders, I wonder, vaguely, about his motives.

Figure I have a year to sort him out before things get stabby.

I can do stabbing. Pretty well, actually. But I don't dance, and he certainly does, probably more than is strictly good for someone who wants to be taken seriously.

Not to be too judgey. It's not like it's a crime. And to his credit, it's not hurting his performance in training at all. From beside me, he follows Linda's instructions perfectly for the rest of the class, still looking a bit glum despite himself.

I wind up frowning, wishing I had the kind of skills it takes to resolve this sort of thing, wishing I knew why the approval-or-lack-thereof of a random instructor, not even a victor, mattered so much to him.

After another forty-five minutes, during which we work every conceivable muscle in our legs and abdomens (and a few I struggle to believe actually exist, but I'll take Linda at her word) we're released from our brightly-colored mats, and I pour what's left of my water bottle down my face, mindful not to get my hair wet when I had it straightened so recently.

"Fuck," Cabernet complains. "She was right, my hips hurt."

"Valuable lesson about showing off?" I suggest with a laugh, though frankly, my own hips hurt enough - I think that might be the point.

"Never!"

He flips his mop of dark brown curls out of his eyes and offers me a brilliant smile.

Okay, maybe I don't have to dig too far to see why Sequin thinks he's a good choice, _fine_.

"What else are you supposed to get done today?" I ask him, kneeling to meticulously disinfect my mat, my barbell, the rest of my things.

Cabernet shrugs in the process of slapping around a few wetwipes.

"Sequin's kind of on me about improvised weapons since my last bout. Tell me, though, in your professional opinion, be honest… do I look like the kind of person who's going to be picking up a rock and whaling on some guy with it?"

The idea actually makes me snort.

"Yeah, no. I think you spend more time on your hair than I do, and that's actually saying something."

"Don't sell yourself short," he laughs. "Seriously, you want to do improvised weapons with me? I can beg if you want. No one makes blunt objects dangerous like you do, Neroli."

"Aw, I'm blushing," I say flatly, sighing.

He's got a point. My last few sparring bouts have involved a fire extinguisher, a solid marble chess board, and yes, a literal rock. Sequin's worried about what the finale will bring, that much is pretty obvious. Emphasizing flexibility over conventional weaponry, though we all have enough hours logged with a sword or a knife to last a lifetime, frankly, so it seems a good bet, the branching out.

I've always liked the little challenges posed by the unconventional. Cab tends to panic, though he hides it well. Sequin tossed him a baseball for his last bout and I watched every stage of grief, culminating in 'acceptance', flash across his disconcertingly attractive face.

Poor Cab. I don't panic. Spent enough time doing that as a kid, the youngest by several years of four sisters and one older brother in the mix, getting dragged around between training and dance and singing and whatever else they all did. There was never a quiet moment in the house, and I hated it, quieted _myself _down to try to find some peace, barely ever talked, even, until I started training.

And it clicked.

It works. I'm good at it. My hands do what they're supposed to do. I've made it further than Sweret or Ambrox ever hoped to go. Not in the hypercompetitive way, more in the… well, this is just my _thing_. The thing that I can apply myself to and see something happen. It works. It makes sense.

Training is basically the least chaotic thing I can imagine. It's got clear rules, clear consequences if you break them.

I live for it, the easy predictability interjected with delightful moments of challenge and adrenaline.

And my parents are so proud.

So it's… well, it all works out. It all will work out. I'm actually really excited to see Sweret tonight. She's been part of the initiative to exchange workers with District 3, has been living over there since they got the program started like three years ago. Has a husband, now, a baby boy named Adamas who I've never met. Barely six months old, finally big enough to travel.

I'm an aunt!

Mentally, I'm filing through evening plans, imagining the baby that I've seen in so many (_so_ many) photos sent over from Three, wondering how Resani, the brother-in-law-I-haven't-met-yet is going to handle the intensity of a Qayyum family dinner, when Cabernet interrupts again.

"So is that a 'no' on improvised weapons?" he asks patiently, shuffling a hand through his curls again and picking up his water bottle.

"Sorry, probably," I say. "I'm just gonna go bother Linda for a bit."

It's uncomfortable, the way the rest of the trainees, hundreds of them, continue to mill about. Cab and I have the best seats in the house for conditioning, since we're presumably next up, only a few remaining in our age group who haven't been shuffled out to other positions until they wear out their contracts. Most of them will probably stick around in this particular facility all day - other instructors, small group leaders, have started to filter through into the mayhem, drawing classes off in one direction or another.

Linda is still at the front of the room, checking something on her holo-tablet. Up close, it's easier to tell that she's pushing fifty - you could never tell from a distance. I cough to announce my arrival, and she looks up, nodding and smiling slightly.

"Can I help you, dear?" she says.

"I hope so," I tell her brightly. "My sister's in town, and, well, this is a little embarrassing, but I was hoping to brag about my numbers. Is there any way you could let me know how my ranking is doing?"

She laughs, setting her tablet down.

"This isn't the other Qayyum we had a few years ago, would it have been… her name escapes me, but she was bright…"

"Sweret," I offer.

"Yes, that would be the one."

Linda picks up the tablet, giving me an indulgent look.

"I'll have to make the call on Sequin's behalf, but I don't see the harm in tipping the hand, here. Give Sweret my best, and let her know that you're very solidly in first rank. You and Mr. Young of the _undulus hips_," she added, with a bit of a frown.

"Thanks," I say sincerely, feeling a rush of relief.

It's like, I know, but it helps to be reminded sometimes. I just like to… I mean… yeah, it's stupid, but it matters, to be able to put a number to it, to have the certainty.

"You need to focus more on your lower legs," she calls after me as I half-bow and begin to make my escape. "Over-reliance on your core will have you plateauing soon enough."

"Yes, Linda!" I reply, already navigating around the small crowds of younger children, pausing to say hello to a few even as the words catch in my throat with discomfort at the proximity of so many bodies.

Even though I'm probably not supposed to - should stay in the gym unless I have specific instructions from Sequin to work on improvised weaponry, like Cab, or if I were going to help him out, I guess - I slip out of the conditioning room and into the main chamber of the massive Center, where the combat plinth and the weaponry racks are sandwiched between archery and knife ranges and larger spear-throwing fields.

I expect to just find Cab, practicing with some ridiculous pile of weapon-adjacent things - firewood, plastic dolls, a blow torch, a crystal orb - but he's not on the combat plinth.

Just frowning at it.

"What's wrong?" I call, approaching, confused. "Need a boost to get up there?"

"It's covered in blood," he says, shrugging exaggeratedly.

"Oh. That's new."

"Yeah. Who are we supposed to talk to about that?"

Now it's my turn to shrug, already making a beeline for Sequin's office. He's right, the typically white plastic surface of the plinth is veritably smeared with blood, at least two sets of footprints in it.

Cabernet catches up with me quickly.

"She's not in," he argues.

"We just need someone to call in the facilities staff, Corsage can do that," I say, though I can't help but wrinkle my nose at the thought of talking to him.

He gives me the creeps. Sequin doesn't seem to have any interest in training me out of that impulse, so I think it can be relied upon. I mean, everybody saw his Games. Everybody knows what the deal is, there. I'm glad to have Cabernet walking beside me as we step into the hall of mostly-empty offices.

When Sequin is out of town, most things just stop happening. There are only a few voices mingling from Corsage's office at the end of the hall, as far as possible from Sequin's locked door, which is situated to our right when we first make our way in.

Cab and I exchange looks, approaching the half-open door. An unfamiliar female voice occasionally interrupts Corsage's all-too-familiar drawl. This shouldn't be so agonizing, but there's not much to do about it, really.

Not everything about life at the Center can be pleasant, after all.

We enter the room.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol

The visit to District 1 hadn't gone precisely according to plan. In fact, it was shaping up to be a kind of strange slow-motion disaster, as Corsage held a pile of bandages over a still-bleeding gash in his throat and attempted to sell her a proposition that she was certain must have some kind of terrible catch.

In the corner of the spacious and surprisingly sparsely-decorated office, the young man at the center of the conversation, a blond seventeen year old named Vermeil Caine, sat at attention, looking, at intervals, tired, wary, and utterly elated. He was also covered in drying blood, though had clearly made an attempt to wipe it off his face with the sleeve of his t-shirt.

Not a very successful attempt, but an attempt was made.

She found herself stifling a sigh.

Sequin's absence had been unexpected - from what little Corsage let on, it seemed she'd booked it out-of-district not long after the announcement regarding mentorship assignments. Back to District 3, ostensibly to check in on some project.

The woman was entitled to run away, of course. She hadn't exactly been dealt an easy hand.

"Here's the thing," Corsage was saying, both feet on his desk, gesticulating languidly with one hand, the other draped back over the head of his chair. "Sequin's not going to give you anyone interesting. Not even Jewel-interesting. She's playing it obnoxiously safe. They're basically choir children. I mean, by District One standards."

"...and what, if I may ask, does that mean?"

Just being in the same room with him for so long was making her skin crawl uncomfortably. Something about the way he situated himself in his rolly office chair reminded her disconcertingly of Saxaul, a comparison that would probably earn her a well-deserved shunning if she ever voiced it aloud. Probably the only thing she could say to sincerely offend him, likening him in any way to the man currently before her.

For the millionth time, she wished that she could talk to him about any of this. Since he had, of course, anticipated how difficult this was going to be. And if negotiating the particulars was agonizing in One, she couldn't imagine how terrible it might be elsewhere.

"Oh, you know," he said vaguely. "What with the… Neroli's probably off comforting a doll-eyed child or saving a kitten from a tree as we speak. Sequin loves her. It's very saccharine, too much proximity will give you diabetes. And don't get me started on Cabernet, he's single-handedly put me off red wine. Fragile, not in a fun way. I'm just proposing we spice it up a bit."

At least he had the good sense not to press too hard, to keep his affect relatively bland, in contrast with the clear evidence of a very recent fight staining his hair and the collar of his shirt. And Vermeil's hands.

"You're trying to sell me _this young man_, though, unless I've missed something," she said, beyond exhausted by the whole business.

"He'll be a wild card. Interesting to watch."

"I have twenty-three other volunteers, odds are about half of them will be just as unpredictable. What does he _do_?"

"Other than steal knives and interrupt Intensive Care reruns?" Corsage quipped, clearly more to Vermeil than to her. "No, ignore that."

The door to the office swung open before things could get even less pleasant, for which she was moderately grateful.

A tall, well-muscled young woman with dark hair and dark skin and a sort of childishly lovely face froze where she stood, the door swinging open before her. To her right, a lanky but equally muscular young man with vividly green eyes looked on in confusion.

"You must be Neroli and Cabernet," she said, suppressing the instinct to roll her eyes at the situation.

Of course, she'd already seen their headshots and vital information. Sequin had submitted it weeks before, had been quite clear about what she was offering, strengths and weaknesses carefully catalogued. She had thought, at least, that the early districts were completely set.

Clearly Sequin had thought so too, if she was willing to leave the Center with Corsage anywhere approaching a position of authority in her absence at such a decisive time.

"That'd be us," the young man said.

"Are you okay, Vermeil?" Neroli interrupted, mostly ignoring Marina, shaking her head as though to get past all the shock of all blood on display in the room and move on to what was important. "What happened?"

Awkwardly, Vermeil glanced up at Corsage as though to ask what he was allowed to say.

Corsage smiled inscrutably, offering no help whatsoever.

"There's no reason to be concerned," Marina cut in, sparing the young man the trouble of answering her well-intentioned question. "Is there something the two of you need?"

"Yeah, the combat plinth," Cabernet explained, unruffled. "There's a lot of blood."

"You don't know how to clean up blood?" she asked, surprised.

Even she knew how that was done.

The young man frowned, as though he hadn't quite figured out who she was or what she was doing there, but just might be uncomfortably close to figuring it out.

"This isn't _District Two_, we don't do that ourselves," he said, and while there was a kind of youthful bravado to the words, an uncertainty had risen in his voice.

"I'm serious, Neroli," Vermeil objected, as the young woman tried to lean in and inspect the bruise blooming across one side of his face and down his arm. "Don't…"

She drew back willingly, putting an arm's length between herself and the blond boy.

"I'm going to call Sequin," she declared, looking cagily between Marina and Corsage and back to Vermeil. "Just because he got cut doesn't mean you can treat him like this. I don't know what's going on, but… Sequin will know. Come on, Cab, Linda can help us -"

"Linda can't help you," Corsage said smoothly, shooting Marina a hint of a smile that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, like a cold breeze had blown past. "Vermeil, if you want this, do it now. If you don't -"

None of them ever learned what Corsage would do if Vermeil didn't. Because immediately, Vermeil did.

Specifically, he drew an oddly-shaped blade from his shoe, one with a handle that seemed to fit in the palm of his hand, crescent-shaped, with a dagger-like silvery appendage protruding forward. He launched himself, in the graceful way that all of these absurdly athletic children had of trying to kill each other, at Cabernet, aiming for the boy's neck.

To his credit, Cabernet reacted just as quickly, drawing back, ducking once he saw the blade. The close quarters of Corsage's office were his undoing, in part, at least.

It didn't kill him. Missed the neck, which was surely Vermeil's goal.

Sliced open his face, though, starting below his chin on one side, extending as the blade sunk dangerously close to his eye on the other side. Even more vividly green, contrasted with the bright red blood spilling into it.

Now, his only reaction was to grip at his face, stumble to his knees, fresh blood pouring out.

Neroli had disarmed Vermeil given half a second more, almost too fast to track. Now she had the dagger - another second later, she'd tossed it to the other side of the room, whirling back to kneel beside Cabernet.

"What the _fuck_," she demanded, holding her friend's face together with her sleeve, turning dark and saturated with blood. "Vermeil, _what the actual fuck is wrong with you_!"

Corsage clucked his tongue in sympathy.

"Awfully rude way of putting it. Do you see what I'm going for here, Marina? Don't you think you'd watch this?"

She couldn't exactly not. The floorboards were too slick with blood to easily escape.

"It's just an idea," he added. "But I think it could be fun."

Neroli, from the ground, where Cabernet had mostly collapsed, tore off a strip of her shirt to better stem the flow of blood and stood, ducking in to grab the phone resting on Corsage's desk.

"I'm calling in medics," she said flatly. "Since no one else seems to care if he dies."

"What did I tell you?" Corsage complained. "She's terrible."

Was this all for her benefit? The distress etched in the expression of the young woman was real, sincere, terrible to behold. Drenched afresh in blood, Vermeil looked positively rapturous. And there was Corsage, smiling through it all, as one of his own students bled profusely on the floor.

He hadn't even taken his feet off the desk.

"You make a good point," she said stiffly, as Vermeil took a step towards Cabernet and Neroli rounded on him like she might gut him then and there, with the phone itself, somehow - from the young woman's certainty, Marina didn't doubt that it was possible.

"No one pays attention to me, but I usually do," Corsage said, grinning. "Nice to meet you, Marina."

"Charmed," she said, standing from her seat, avoiding the growing pool of blood on her way out the door. "I'll… consider your suggestions."

There wasn't much of an alternative.

She wondered, on her way to the hovercraft, if such drastic meddling might finally snap Sequin for good. That seemed excessively hopeful, even for her. The return of the Games would embolden people like Corsage, without a doubt. Three years had allowed him the opportunity to evolve into a far more dangerous creature than she remembered, even in the context of his own Games.

It remained to be seen what the year leading up to the finale would do for Vermeil and Neroli.

x

_Welcome to introductions! Do I have a plan? No! Do I have all of the tributes? No! Am I going to have a good time regardless? Of course I am, and if you don't think so, you don't know me. Would love a District 2 guy if anyone's sitting on one, particularly if you've only given me one so far. If you're worried about investing a lot of time on the submission form, don't sweat it; I'm seriously just looking for ideas, more or less, and if you have one, it would be my honor to try to bring it to life._

_Thanks for Vermeil and Neroli, I look forward to bringing them into the Games! I hope you find them pleasant to read about and are enjoying this so far._


	6. Against the World (or, District 2)

Against the World (or, District 2)

x

If I was waiting I had been  
invaded by time.  
_But do you think you're free?  
_I think I recognize the patterns of my nature.  
_But do you think you're free?_

'Mutable Earth', Louise Glück

x

June O'Roarke, District 2

We're supposed to be watching a cut of Aaron's Games, focusing on the difference between his early-Games approach and his late-Games approach, once his partner was dead and he was sort of off the rails. He didn't like that idea much, but regardless of what he likes, he's stuck supervising the hour-long break while Claudia and a few other instructors prepare the combat area for the series of culling matches due for today.

So we stopped doing that ten minutes in, when we'd barely gotten past the chariots on the cut, and now everyone's abandoned the papers they're supposed to be filling in with observations and details. Aaron has the channel switched to a new episode of A Capitol Experience, after vaguely instructing us to pay attention to interdistrict cultural differences, but he's really the only one watching.

The classroom practically smells like tension. It's the last culling match before verdicts start being made about who volunteers in the coming finale. There are only forty of us left, at this stage, and all of us will be fighting today.

Some of us are going to die, and more importantly, end up culled out of the pool.

"Who do you think you're going to get?" my best friend, Kara, whispers from next to me. "D'you think she's going to make you fight Basalt?"

She's pretending not to be nervous, but I can tell from the way her fingers twine in her dark hair, flicking at the end of a strand methodically, that she's sincerely worried. For me as well as for her.

It's a dangerous moment to be anywhere near the top of the rankings.

Claudia keeps everyone's numbers under tight wraps, but there are rumors, obviously. Some of the younger instructors are gossipy. She doesn't do much about that. I figure it motivates us. Definitely motivated me, hearing that I was a frontrunner.

Not ranked first. I'm sure someone would have mentioned something to that effect if I were even… top three in the girls' pool, after the last matches. The thought makes my throat tighten. In the last month or so, I've redoubled my efforts in training. Made the risky call of dropping out of school, much to my mother's chagrin. Though it's not as though a Peacekeeper needs too much education beyond the seventeenth year, so even if I don't make the cut, it's like… I just needed to focus, I _know_ that was my problem. And I _have _been focusing.

Working harder than I ever have before, really, which is saying something.

"I hope it's Basalt," I say. "That'd be… if I could take her favorite out, that'd be it for me."

Ignoring, of course, in this statement, the fact that our rumored first-draft male volunteer is a sincerely dangerous and formidable young man. I can catch a glimpse of the back of his head, in the center of the first row of seats, his wild dark hair tied back as he watches, apparently paying close attention to the proceedings onscreen.

In this episode of A Capitol Experience, the group of district children brought to experience some delight of the Capitol - an orchid hothouse, a view of the cityscape from a mountaintop hike and a rooftop dinner, or some combination of sightseeing to that effect - includes Alexandria and Cassiopeia Ota, the sisters of one of our volunteers, in the 89th. Marcus, who died. I wonder if that's why Aaron chose to put this particular one on.

They look delighted, at least, for the cameras, the older of them just a hair younger than I am. Oddly, their district of residency is noted as District 7.

"Ugh, at this point, I just want a last high mark. I talked to her the other day - she thinks I could have a real shot at starting out in District One if I join the force with my credentials right now," Kara sighs. "Any luck, I'll be watching you win from the lap of luxury."

"Maybe don't say that aloud?" I sigh, though it's not like Aaron's gonna flip out on her for not taking things seriously. He's not the one I'd be worried about overhearing.

No one explicitly tells us not to treat late-stage training as a stepping stone to an especially good Peacekeeping assignment, but it's implied.

"Hey, last culling match, let me live," she says, cracking her knuckles one by one, then twining her fingers back into her hair, the confidence in her tone undermined slightly by her expression, which is, transparently, now, nervous.

It's not like Kara's not good at training. You kind of have to be, to still be in the pool by the mid-to-late seventeens. But she's been checking out, lately, on the most important parts. It's only obvious if you know her well. This isn't the first time she's made that sort of aside, but it's definitely the highest volume she's opted to use.

"Can't believe it's the last one," I say, happy to change the subject.

"Yeah. Almost made it," she agrees. "Hey, did you hear Diabase and Poppaea broke up?"

"What, seriously? So Poppy's single?"

"She might be due some comforting," Kara says, wiggling her eyebrows at me suggestively and snorting when I roll my eyes at her.

"She _hates_ me, dude," I complain.

"Yeah, we've established that, but that was literally just because you kicked Dia's ass in the last match and she decided to be a bitch about it, nothing you did wrong. Now they're _broken up_," she insists. "I'm telling you…"

In fairness to Poppy, the feud was more because of a debate about a move from the particular culling match that Claudia ruled legal but a few instructors felt had been questionable. We're not technically supposed to 'use' the boundaries of the plinth, though the rulebook apparently specifies that we're not supposed to _deliberately_ make use of the boundaries in a formal match. That word matters a lot, because no one does much deliberately during a match. You're trying to _win_, and if you can get an edge or get someone to stop choking you by shoulder-slamming their throat into the flexible border, you do exactly that.

Nothing deliberate about it.

And Claudia agreed with me, though she privately warned me not to repeat the move, so… it should have been fine.

But being the kind of person who's willing to get creative for an edge doesn't always make you the most friends in the Center. It's not like most people other than Kara do much more than tolerate me when necessary.

"Tell you what," I say. "If she lives through this afternoon, I'll talk to her. And when she breaks my nose or some shit, I'll talk to _you_. And can you guess what I'm gonna say?"

"Is it gonna be 'I told you so'?"

"You _do _know me."

She sighs, back to twirling her hair.

"I hope it's a long blade. A nice long, light blade," she frets, the sudden change to her tone making it clear that the rest of the banter is just a smokescreen to how increasingly anxious she is about the coming matches.

Claudia's weaponry choices for the matches often feel completely random. Especially so, as of late. At the last match, two months ago, half the weapons were improvised-style. I had bare hands, hence the issue of appropriating the plinth's boundary as an unlicensed weapon.

To be fair, Kara had a particularly rough time in hers. It makes sense that she'd be panicky leading up to her final match, if her last one is any indication. She and Breccia each had _long-handled mops_. Not only were the weapons unfamiliar, but Breccia made a clever opponent. Immediately splintered her mop into two pieces, in a way that Kara, forty pounds lighter, couldn't easily do herself, and had wound up with twice the mobility.

My friend is lightning-quick and an excellent strategist, one of the most patient people that I know. But she was thrown off by the mops, and while she won, she was in the hospital almost as long as Breccia, who was shuffled off to Peacekeeping… I think she's in training with the force in Five, if I had to guess? But Kara was so shaken by the whole thing. Rightly so, honestly.

She stopped talking about volunteering, after that.

Realistic expectations are good, of course, but it was kind of sad to see her just… give up, on something she was once so certain that she wanted.

I'd give anything for that kind of sureness, the conviction she has. I don't know where it comes from. I just know how hollow I've always felt in comparison to her. To everyone, really. How I truly don't give a shit if Poppy likes me or not, so long as I can kick her face in during the culling match if Claudia tells me to, and even that…

My mom might be getting to me. Or just the numbers on the clock face shifting closer and closer to the moment of truth. Basalt looks so fucking relaxed, the fucker. Though I guess some of that is probably conjecture, since Kara and I are sitting in the furthest corner of the room, a few buffer seats between us and the rest of the class.

Two months ago, I probably couldn't have… I mean, I think I could have beaten him, or anyone, but I'm not always the most reliable at guessing my own aptitudes. Now, with the right weapon, I know I could make it right, I know I could win, feel just a little bit of something, get just a tiny piece of something from Claudia to start filling the chasm in my chest, so easy to forget about until I'm staring at the darkened ceiling, trying to go to sleep.

When we were younger, my little sister Brita would slip into bed with me if she could manage it without waking dad, could navigate around him either before he came home wasted or after he'd passed out. On good nights. On bad nights, it wasn't safe to leave the room.

It's not like that anymore. Not for a while, now. I fixed that, but it doesn't feel fixed, doesn't feel whole and right, just a solved problem waiting to be un-solved, waiting to be un-fixed. The second I walk away, the whole thing will come toppling down.

Always hollow and just not right and not enough.

Claudia gets it. I think she might be the only one who actually does. And she knows that training is the only way to fill the hole, even temporarily. She gets it. I think she might be the same way, in a sense. My mom the-opposite-of-gets-it, which seems _ungrateful_, with all I've done for this family, all I can do, but I don't want to _say_ it, not with what she's been through, so… suffice to say I have a lot of reasons for spending more time at the Center than I do at home.

"I just want this to be done," I say. "I just need to _know_."

Kara puts a sympathetic hand on my arm, and I muster up a smile for her, though I'm finally in the same grip of pure nerves that she's been consumed by for the last hour.

What if, what if, what if. Doesn't matter. Battleaxe or dental floss or dagger or textbook.

When what's inside is empty, it pays to build the outside strong. And I know I'm as strong as anyone in this room, and I know that I _need_ to kill whoever I'm matched with. I need a blood victory.

"One more match," she murmurs, staring at the window, though the light that filters in is greyed by the cloudy sky.

The door opens, and the room goes quiet. Aaron swiftly changes the channel. Onscreen, the girl from District 11, from his year, guts the boy from District 1.

From Claudia's expression, she isn't fooled, but she also isn't inclined to say anything.

She's been spread thin, lately.

"It's time," she announces. "Five minutes to convene around the combat plinth. Bring your bags."

That's been an issue in the past, people leaving their shit in the classroom and then dying, an unnecessary complication for their families, trying to find their ID cards and whatever little trinkets they carted around.

_My mom would be heartbroken if I died today_.

Not at all a welcome thought. Of course she would be. Her and Bri, no one left to take care of them. Even dad, maybe, in his way, when he's not pickling in white liquor.

So I won't, simple as that. Not today, and not tomorrow. And I won't lose, and I won't flinch, and I won't choke, and she has nothing to worry about.

Fuck, you know what? I hope it's Basalt.

We file out into the main chamber, the one paneled floor to ceiling with windows, nestled inside the once-overtaken remains of Mount Lupus. Where the rebels nearly killed us, but pivotally failed to kill us all. Trainees our age won the war for the Capitol, years ago. Sometimes Claudia talks about that fondly. I know she was one of them. There's something hypnotic about her, about everything I know she's seen, about everything I know she knows.

And now she's standing in her customary position by the plinth, watching as we crowd around it, near-silent. I could practically hear the heartrates of the people around me if mine wasn't so loud in my ears.

"We'll begin," she announces. "With Basalt Sehan."

He steps forward, silent, tall, dark-haired and inscrutable. If anyone had the idea to tease him for not conforming to the District 2 standard, whether for his appearance or for the oddness of his late addition to the Center, when he was fourteen, over half a decade later than even the latest-accepted recruits, well… they know not to.

I'm in kind of a weird position, having seen the Center change so dramatically since Marcus died in the 89th. In some ways, it's a kinder place. More careful about pushing people to the outside. Claudia, at least, is far more careful, and what she does is what everyone else has to work with. We still fight and bleed and die, same as always, but you can't get away with being an irredeemable piece of trash while you do it. At least, not in the same ways.

Basalt doesn't really know how lucky he is.

"Matched with… Lyxis Walker," Claudia continues.

I let out a sigh, not really sure why I was holding my breath in the first place. So it won't be me. Fuck, I guess.

She holds up the weapon. An easy one. Spears. Tosses the first to Basalt, the second to Lyxis, a tall blond boy with an uncommonly square jaw and tired-looking eyes, generally, though he's far more wary than anything, now, climbing up to the plinth.

Kara's fists are already curled, her knuckles standing out beneath her pale skin. Oh. She's fond of Lyxis. I guess he's kind of handsome, in a way, and tends to be decent to her. I expect it's because Kara's actually a nice person herself, has managed to avoid the 'moderate to severe hellbitch' rep that I've more or less embraced.

Honestly, I'm not sure how the fight is going to go. They're both good. Very good, though in different ways. Lyxis is dutiful, yes, but also notably talented. Better with a sword than a spear, but it's not as though it's Basalt's favored weapon, either. And Basalt's strength, beyond his enviable physicality, is his unexpectedness.

I imagine if Claudia had anticipated that bringing someone like him in would pay off so well earlier, we'd have far more late-addition trainees in the mix. There may be more to come in the future.

Funny, how the two people on the plinth have so thoroughly distracted me from my own worries. When my worries exclusively involve _myself _on _the very same plinth_.

"It'll be Lyxis," Kara says quietly, glancing over at me.

Predicting the winners of the other fights is something of a tradition that I got started, at one point, after someone or another made some loud declaration of the unsportsmanliness of treating the culling process as a game while Kara and I were whispering speculation between ourselves. I responded by, in a slightly louder voice, announcing that I was betting twenty credits on my own unsportsmanly ass.

This is as much for me as it is for her.

"Maybe," I say, keeping my voice just as soft as Claudia gestures to denote the beginning of the match, and Lyxis lunges forward.

Kara reaches out her hand, closing her eyes rather than watch. I take it, offering her a comforting squeeze.

As always, I keep mine open as the first gout of blood hits the white surface of the plinth. Then the next. Then the next.

x

Basalt Sehan, District 2

The problem is, I like Lyxis. In theory. In practice, I don't think he's ever said a word to me, but the thing about not speaking is that you wind up with a lot of time to listen. While he's not one of the bleeding hearts that Claudia is always mulling over, nor any of the few people other than her who bother to pay more than cursory or skeptical attention to me, he seems like a decent kind of person.

I wasn't raised by the Center the same way that most of the present crowd was. Some things about it still don't fully sit right. Among them, killing - _trying_ to kill! - someone who, in a different world, might be my friend.

Culling seems like an awful waste.

I told this to Claudia before my first culling match, after a few months had passed training at the Center. In the lexicon of signs she had set about teaching to me and herself, seemingly for the fun of it, though it was certainly quicker and easier than writing everything out.

"Waste is a failure of efficiency," she said absentmindedly, barely looking up from some kind of message she was drafting on her tablet. "Where do you think the process is failing?"

"It's a failure to kill loyal trainees, isn't it?" I signed.

"Is it a failure to lose a piece in a game of chess in the service of winning the game?"

"I don't know anything about chess."

At the time, I certainly didn't. Three years out, now, I've learned a lot more than I would care to.

Lyxis aims his first blow at my heart. His precision is excellent, the angle of his spearhead lining up perfectly, ready to slot between my ribs. I dodge, but he catches me in the side, regardless, splashing blood on the white surface of the plinth as the speartip scrapes my ribcage.

I drop low and strike lower. He's heavy on his feet, like a lot of broadsword users. My speartip parts the muscle of his thigh, and from the way his stance shifts immediately, I've done some real damage. Instead of drawing back immediately, I shove the spear deeper, twist hard, and leave it there before I whirl away.

He stumbles, knows he's badly hurt. Probably much worse than anyone watching can tell.

Biting back a grimace, unarmed, now, I draw closer again. Give him an opening. He takes it, lurches forward and goes for my gut. His movements are so pained around the spear lodged in the meat of his femoral muscles that it's abruptly very easy to predict what he'll do next.

You always want to make a decisive move early, throw the opponent off-balance, use your advantage immediately and as often as possible. The foregone conclusion in most of Claudia's instruction is that I have an advantage.

I'm not sure she's right about that. I definitely don't usually feel advantaged.

My life wasn't supposed to lead here, to this plinth or to the Center or even out of the fringe mining village where I was born. I really shouldn't have left. There was a life, there, that I remember in shades of grey. Quarry work, the kind everyone did. Running errands, clambering up sheer rock faces with Elspa and Olyvine. Workers from out-of-district showing up to change the way things were done, people from Three and One, surveyors and techs and all sorts of things we'd never seen.

Easy way to make a good amount of money, a handful of credits here and there, dashing around down familiar corridors as new extraction processes began carrying messages or tracking down telltale rock formations for the new foreman.

Also an easy way to wind up trapped in the worst collapse the district had seen since Bakerville. Badly pinned, Olyvine unconscious and bleeding from her nose, Elspa crushed immediately.

Whether it sounds more or less traumatic than it is depends on the day. I _did _live. Thanks, in part, to Claudia's favorite television show, which was how she found me. I wondered exactly what happened, there, until I saw for myself how raptly she watches it.

She watched Cora Davis, our victor from the 89th, bring me back from a terrible precipice. And she decided that the Center had to have me, and because it's District 2 and she's Claudia, that's exactly what happened.

And Oly gets to stay inpatient for the rest of her life if she wants, and my parents live safely in the central sector, and I dodge a spearhead aimed unerringly at my stomach.

It just works out.

Lyxis, likely not purposefully, does manage to land a blow. Not with the head of his spear, but with the butt of mine, still protruding from his leg. As his initial blow whistles past me, he drives the jutting wooden shaft into my stomach.

That's not good. Almost more debilitating than the pointy end would have been.

After a very strong start to the final match, I take a blow with barely more force than a good punch and promptly throw up on Lyxis' shoes.

At least it disorients him almost as much as it does me, and it takes him a second to realize this is something he can take advantage of, my being doubled over and spewing bile. I like this about him, the fact that the first emotion that flashes across his face is pity.

Doesn't stop him from catching me by the neck, notching the shaft below my jaw and dragging me powerfully to his chest, trying to crush my trachea. Without any serious upper body injuries, he's frighteningly strong, and in the midst of all of it, my vision goes white and I start to lose my balance, which isn't uncommon.

Injury to the vagus nerve. A whole host of complications that can't be undone without prohibitively expensive Capitol tech. That's what Cora told me, anyway, answering questions after I wrote them out on a little chalkboard.

Some advantage. I can't even get the cool 'no pain' nerve damage, I get the 'weak stomach, complete muteness' one, which is… excitingly, delightfully, _excruciatingly_ fun.

Lyxis and I are both powerfully built. Three years or nine years, it doesn't matter excessively much at this point. So I flail, and he holds me in place by the throat, closer and closer to killing me.

Until my hand locks around what I'm looking for - the spear in his leg.

I wrench at it with all of my strength, and down he goes. Bringing me with him, though I'm prepared for it. Rip my spear free, now, once I've gulped air and rolled to my knees.

While I want to do something kind, something that tells him I respect him, don't hate him, wish him nothing bad, I promise… that's hard to do, and my vision is still starry from being choked at, my stomach threatening to spill even more acid.

So I do the easy thing, not the kind thing, and drive the spear into his stomach. Once, twice. Then leave it there and stumble to my feet.

In a blink, it's over.

My vision starts to clear as I gulp air, my heartrate so high that I can't make out individual beats. The first face I can make out is that of a dark-haired girl, tears in her eyes, her friend's arm around her shoulders. Kara, who had a special affection for Lyxis.

He's shifting on the platform. Trying to get up. But he can't.

I find Claudia, in her position beside the plinth.

She nods.

In moments like these, I wish for words more than anything. Comforting ones. Just to tell him that he did well, because he did, and… at the same time, I know she's watching me closely.

My first culling match went more or less like this one. I was a little stronger than my opponent, Martia, a girl from my year. She was far more experienced than I was, and by the time I was standing over her, I was bleeding from a deep gash in my arm, another across my face, and her knife was lodged in my thigh.

Claudia nodded that time, too - a 'blood victory', as they're called. The loser dies, the winner has proved themselves exceptional over their opponent. A high honor.

I looked up at her and signed 'no'.

Martia continued to choke on her own blood as Claudia raised an eyebrow. Stared me down. I stared right back, still under the illusion, I guess, that I had any choice within the Center's plan when it came down to it. Very stupid, in hindsight.

She died before we broke out of the standoff. Aspirated too much blood.

It didn't feel like I made it out of that with clean hands. Didn't feel like I'd won that battle of wills. And it especially didn't feel that way when, that evening, Claudia told me that there was no place for a superiority complex in her Center, and that if I felt that I was so much better than the other trainees, I could fight my next match with a broken hand.

Claudia follows through on her threats, and I did exactly that, and I won, and this time when she nodded, I nodded back.

There are tradeoffs to this life. It _is _a better option. My father had always dreamed of leaving our village. I don't like to think of what he might have done, one of his children dead, two disabled beyond conventional work. Where that might have taken him.

This is better than the alternative.

Bile rises fresh in my stomach, but I fight it down, easier to do when there's not a spear grinding into my gut. Kneel beside Lyxis, hoping he can see something meaningful in my expression. I nod to him, not back at Claudia.

And then I break his neck, like I'm supposed to, letting my eyes fall closed as vertebrae separate beneath my hands. I don't want to see it.

It's cruel. A lot of things here are cruel, sometimes unconscionably so.

Claudia has always been quick to remind me that this is much the case elsewhere, too. That I'm already a part of it, that it would be senseless to back out now. The only way to make the mundane cruelties necessary for survival into something meaningful is to lean into it. And she isn't wrong, I guess.

"Congratulations, Basalt," she announces. "Well-fought."

The facilities team quietly appears, ushering me down from the plinth, towards the medic on staff, who offers me antiemetics and disinfects the wound in my side, the bruising on my neck, suggests that I could be transported to the hospital if I like, but it isn't necessary. I shake my head, painfully, as the bruising is going to be pretty intense. I can't stand hospitals. Spent enough time in one for a lifetime after the accident. Can barely visit Oly, even, since it's so familiar. Gets me in a bad place.

Within seconds, Lyxis' body is gone, the plinth is cleaned of blood and bile, and there's no evidence that any of the last three minutes happened.

"We'll continue," Claudia says, taking a second to smile at me, just slightly, from her position by the platform, "with June O'Roarke."

June extricates herself from the crowd, tying her long blondish hair back, though a few strands hang in her face. She's powerfully built, easily one of the most formidable women from our year.

"Matched," Claudia adds, as June climbs to take her place on the plinth, "with Kara Nielson."

Since I've been watching June, wondering vaguely at the white scar running down her forehead, why the Center hasn't had that scrubbed out by now, figuring there must be something going on that no one's bothered telling me about the way things are done here, I have a front row seat as her face falls into a sort of horror that I understand intimately.

And then, just as quickly, her composure returns. A neutral mask.

Whispers rise in the crowd. June isn't anyone's favorite person, strictly speaking. She's prickly, even by the Center's standards. Has taken a few opportunities to step out of line and make enemies, though, critically, never to make one of Claudia.

Kara, though - people like Kara. She's a graceful, lanky sort of woman with more a dancer's build than that of a fighter. And she's possibly June's only real friend. And at the moment, she's shakingly climbing up onto the plinth, wearing an expression like she's seen the end of the world.

Even the medic stops squinting at my blood pressure, looking up and frowning.

Claudia produces a pair of heavy battleaxes. One to June, who catches it easily. Kara's hands shake, and the weapon, which must weigh a sizeable fraction of what she does, clatters to the ground.

June picks it up for her, mask-like calm, even, measured.

And here I was, thinking my match was so terrible.

Neither of them seems to want to start, of course, though I remember from matches before that June has never been quite so hesitant.

"On with it," Claudia admonishes them briefly.

We all know what that means. The Center, too often to be chance, has paired couples, friends, and siblings in culling matches. In the early years, I'm told, when the matches begin at twelve, some refused to fight. When that's been the case, an example has been made.

Another horror I've been spared by my late start.

I close my eyes as June raises her axe.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol

She'd debated whether to make a physical appearance in District 2. It seemed risky, given her history with Claudia, even more so given that the errand would be to investigate her tribute selection process. She was fond of all of her body parts and didn't especially like the idea of losing any.

So she called Aaron, which seemed like the next best option, though he'd been slow to warm up to her over the years. He answered in a shadowy classroom, illuminated only by the ambient light filtering in from the cloudy day outside.

"Bad time?" she asked.

"Generally," he agreed. "Culling matches today."

"Ouch. Holding up okay?"

"Several down. It's been a bloody morning. Mostly unnecessary. You're calling about volunteers, right?" he sighed, apparently preoccupied.

"Can you tell me anything?"

"Yes, she's not keeping it a secret outside of the recruits. Basalt and June. I'm surprised she hasn't sent you their metrics, yet."

"Maybe I'm not supposed to know."

He shrugged.

"Either way, the last barrier was their matches this morning, and they both passed. I didn't watch, but I have her confirmation. I can send you the files by the end of the day."

"Please, when you get the chance."

'Uneventful' was the last word she expected to use to describe the process of volunteer selection and confirmation in Two, but here she was. No challengers appeared, no attempts to undermine the process by Aaron, though he wasn't looking especially well.

"How are you feeling about mentoring Eight?" she asked, sincerely curious whether it was some element of the recently disclosed assignments that had Aaron in such a mood.

"Ambivalent? I mean, it'll be a departure from the typical… this. I guess I appreciate that. You don't know who they'll be yet, right?"

"No, while I'm reviewing each district's nomination and confirmation process, at the moment, only One and Two have already selected both tributes."

Aaron paused, as though he had something to say but didn't exactly know how. She waited, keeping her face as neutral as she could manage.

"How fucked are they?" he asked, simply. "Basalt and June."

She grimaced before she could stop herself.

"The Gamemakers aren't going to be targeting them, if that's what you mean. I can promise you that whatever my relationship with Claudia, your trainees won't suffer for it."

"But they won't win."

"Three years ago, the Head Gamemaker looked the President in the eyes and told her that Manari would. Things happen. What happens in the arena depends on June and… forgive me, Bas… Basalt? Before anything or anyone else. They'll win if they win. We don't have an agenda other than making clear the horrors of the Games."

"...I thought we were already pretty clear on those?" Aaron asked wryly, massaging his temples, elbows resting on some kind of desk surface.

"Things could always be worse. The goal is to leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Like Polly spraying her plant with capsaicin. Halogen doesn't try to eat it anymore, even now that she's stopped."

Aaron sighed.

"Well, not my problem."

No, it wasn't. For the moment, it remained very much Marina's problem, how exactly that could be done, what a 'just but terrible' Games would look like, how to get from where she was to where she wanted to be at the end of this. A year somehow didn't seem like enough time, but there was no room to push things back. They were doing this in the first place because of the massive pressure exerted politically to bring the Games back in response to popular demand. She hadn't anticipated just how much of Panem's income redistribution and social projects were accomplished through taxes levied specifically on betting and ad revenues.

This introduced further problems, more serious fiscal complications brought on each year the hiatus persisted without an accompanying amendment to other taxes, which was, of course, wildly unpopular - expecting Capitol citizens to give up their beloved Games and an additional twenty percent of their paychecks to fund the continued function of a Games-less country had proved politically impossible.

Impossible so far.

She bit back a sigh.

"They're good kids," Aaron added, as though the length of the silence was growing physically uncomfortable for him, shifting restlessly in his chair. "I know you probably wouldn't think about that, it being District Two, but this whole thing…"

"No, I don't think little of any of you for your upbringing," she said quickly.

His raised eyebrows said he might not believe her quite as much as she hoped.

"It would be hypocritical of me," she added. "Truly, Aaron, you should feel free to come into the Capitol at some point, Cora would love to see you at one of their dinners."

"I think the next time I'm permitted out-of-district will likely be on the train to Eight," he said glumly.

"She…"

"Unless you have a few dozen of those safehouses sitting empty, you're not getting me out of this," he interrupted. "It's a kind thought, but it's not realistic. I made my bed. Much as I appreciate your attempts to get me out of my contract, I'm going to keep laying in it."

"Just be careful," she sighed.

"Miserable advice, but thanks."

A few minutes after hanging up, a set of headshots and metrics appeared in her inbox, true to Aaron's word. Sickeningly enough, she did recognize Basalt from his episode of Intensive Care, once she could put a face to the name. Surely, Cora would as well.

She wondered if taking a shower might make her feel any better about the four names, the faces, the profiles attached. Probably not. She would just have to get used to feeling like this, to waiting for the anvil overhead to fall. One more year to make it work.

God willing, she would make it work.

x

_Several more spots remain on the lineup. Looking for a D7, D11, and Capitol gal, and a D9 guy. If you haven't submitted yet, consider doing so!_


	7. A Bitter Aftertaste (or, District 3)

A Bitter Aftertaste (or, District 3)

x

I have always been in love with  
last chances especially  
now that they really do  
seem like last chances

'The Imaginal Stage', D. A. Powell

x

Jaego Lofton, District 3

The last time I spoke to my brother Mezzi was the night before I was scheduled to take the train to District 8, on the verge of something great, something far bigger than me or even my district of origin. I had to be on the platform by six - that's in the morning, mind you - and he was up late, with about all of his friends over, by the sound of it.

That had been a common theme for the few months leading up to my acceptance in the Interdistrict Cooperative Exchange program. I was up late studying, Romex and our parents were out late working, and Mezzi's friends were talking, often loudly, about… something.

Plausible-deniability 'something', usually.

And _usually_, that was fine by me. The noise from the next room, the larger of the three bedrooms, which he shared with Romex, kept me from falling asleep on my soldering work. It was comforting, honestly, not to be alone in the house. I love my older brothers. Did then, still do now. There's never been any question about that, never any doubt as to how much. Maybe the five-year age difference as a buffer is behind that, since I was never competing with either of them for anything the way they, more or less, did with each other, being about the same age. They could just be proud of me, and I could be proud of them. No matter how much our paths in life have always seemed to be running in three radically different directions.

Mezzi would like that turn of phrase, 'radical'. Ha.

The problem was that, proud or not, I needed to sleep.

So, as I sometimes did, I knocked on his door, stomach doing flips at the thought of bugging him, but even more knotted up at the prospect of missing my train and making a total idiot of myself on the precipice of what should have been something amazing, a moment to celebrate.

"Is that your brother?" someone asked, too muffled by the barrier to tell exactly who.

"Hey, JJ, come on in!" Mezzi called. "Just keep your eyes closed, don't see too much, okay?"

He never meant that literally. It was more of a joke than anything, since Mezzi has never especially believed in consequences, while my fixation on the future and concern about what'll happen once I get there is almost debilitatingly intense.

The door swung open.

A haphazardly erected board showed what could have been several weeks of scribblings, diagrams, one _blueprint_ that I took special care not to look at too closely. Plausible deniability. Several of his friends sat scattered around the room, on both his and Romex's bed, and where space was lacking, on the floor.

"What's up, little man?" he asked. "Shouldn't you be asleep?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, coughing nervously, unused to this many eyes on me in close quarters, acutely aware that not only was I wearing my pajamas, I was wearing my least nice pajamas, all of my even remotely decent clothes packed away by my door in advance of the 5-in-the-morning dash to the train station. "Sorry, that's kinda why I knocked."

"Shit. Sorry." He grinned ruefully. "Kinda got carried away."

A few of his friends chuckled at that. Some familiar faces among them - Aramid Yagi, still looking fixated on the plan despite the interruption, one of the many childhood friends involved in the student protests, that Mezzi has become far closer with, since the 89th Games. Penrose Gordon, who I happened to know he had a pretty massive thing for, from the broadcasting and signalling academy, sitting beside him on his bed, elbowing him in the ribs.

"Yeah, Mez, you gotta settle down a bit," she laughed. "Wouldn't want to get the police in here, fuck everything up over a _noise complaint_."

Pretty rich, coming from her, since Penrose and a few other dropouts from broadcasting had basically spent the last year in and out of jail for disrupting official district telecasting. Mezzi considered that approximately the coolest thing he'd ever heard. Worth telling his kid brother about at length, hearts practically materializing in his eyes as he did so.

Our parents would have lost their minds if he did half of what Penrose got up to - probably even if they knew she and her crew were over.

Lucky for him, or maybe ultimately unlucky, I guess, I've never been a snitch.

"You're right, you're right," he sighed. "Yo, Aramid, anyone from microtech get back to you yet on the disruptors question?"

"Not yet," Aramid said, looking away.

"Well, we're kinda stalled anyway, then. Hey, you're not nervous, are you? Looking for an excuse to come see me?" Mezzi suggested, back to smiling like an idiot.

"No," I insisted.

"Aw, come on, I'm gonna miss you, JJ! Come on over here. Damn, don't look so freaked out, you've got bigger stuff to worry about, don't you?"

I couldn't help but see the blueprint, noticing, acutely, how much it looked like the Justice Building. How the diagrams could definitely have been side doors, windows, very recognizable recording hardware from the building's external features.

"Where're you headed out to?" Penrose asked, scooting over on the bed so I could join them, conveniently edging almost into Mezzi's lap. "Mez keeps insisting you're off to save the world."

"Just, uh, District Eight," I said quickly. "Not even really to save it. Just a year's exchange."

"Shit, you got accepted?"

"Impressive," Aramid added, looking up. "Someone got the brains in the family."

"Rude!" Mezzi complained. "Romex is smart, too, I'm an _aberrational_ dipshit, not the rule. JJ's getting out of here before any of us, though. My baby brother's a little genius, isn't he?"

He leaned over Penrose to try to pinch my cheek, and I jerked away.

"Don't be an asshole," I complained, the tips of my ears feeling uncomfortably warm at the praise, at the way some of Penrose's friends were looking at me, now.

"That's really cool," Kilany, a girl I thought might even be in my year at school, though in some other field, cut in. "Wait, are you actually _working _there?"

"Yeah, some infrastructure projects, but also going to school there like normal," I said, trying not to choke under the scrutiny, but far more stressed out about the whole thing than I'd been even for the selection interview a month prior. "It's about culture exchange as much as building stuff."

That was what I'd been told, at least. An initiative underway to mend fences between Three and Eight, address some of the fractures in interdistrict relations that had been created by the addition of greater levels of mechanization to Eight's factories. All the same people, all from the same country. Proving District 3 isn't just some awful place full of assholes come to steal away your livelihoods. We can help, too. Hence the public amenities projects, and also hence the sticking of a bunch of especially bright and interview-able young people in schools in the process of doing it. We're humans, too. Easier to believe that about someone you've met than about a whole population you only really hear about during the Hunger Games.

The idea was positively nerve-wracking. I'd always thought of myself as more of a… well, the same way almost anyone from District 3 thinks of themselves. I build stuff. Being an ambassador was something totally different, though I did come up with a great off-the-cuff line in my interview about 'building bridges' as a metaphor for the work the project was doing.

"Well, we'll shut up a bit, don't worry," Mezzi reassured me, reaching a little further to give me a comforting pat on the shoulder.

"Yeah, I'm definitely gonna worry," I complained, glancing back up at the board. "_Please_ don't do anything stupid."

"I, uh…" he trailed off, glancing at Penrose with a smile that was far more obvious than be probably intended, that made my heartrate catch, just slightly, in my throat.

"Please?"

"C'mon, JJ, we can't all ship off to District Eight to fix the world," he said, sounding, oddly, almost cheerful. "You know as well as me that shit's still broken, that someone's gotta make things happen. And it's gonna have to be us. So you take the whole rest of the country, and I'll handle District Three, okay?"

I glanced back at the board. Beyond the blueprint and the sketches of Justice Building fixtures, I knew, viscerally, that I'd seen some of these schematics before. Recently, too. As recently as the last Games. When Bridget…

We'd watched together, like everyone had last year as our tributes made it so abnormally far along. Him and me and Romex, even our parents when they could. Including my dad, wheeling up to the television in his chair. Getting excited, really excited, for the first time in a long time. Dion was cool, of course, but Bridget - we knew her. Everyone knew her, after she'd basically organized the student protests herself, but Mezzi had actually _met her_ a few times, through Aramid, who was kinda in her core team.

At first he'd been all 'I told you so' about how agitators tended to get reaped, which was harder to deny than usual after having accompanied him to the protest on the steps of the Justice Building back then, clambered onto his shoulders to get a better look while she spoke. Feeling that energy, and then, the next day, the air knocked out of our lungs as her name was called at the reaping.

But then she lived, one day, two days, a week, two weeks, and it was like - maybe Mayor Rhodes finally found someone he couldn't just recycle into parts like a defective machine when they didn't fit into the district the way he wanted them to. Maybe she was coming home, like Polly had, years before, and we'd have another mentor, a success story, a 'screw you' to the people trying to keep us down, trying to warp our district into something awful.

I mean, I never really got into the whole burn-the-system deal she kind of had going on the way Mezzi did, but _most_ people didn't. Bridget had fought the plans to get started on a training center, and she did end up dead at the hands of a trainee. Really dead. Not like him, who… no one's totally sure what happened, there, but the guy who killed her got scooped out, is alive right now, even though he didn't win.

And Bridget was _dead_-dead, and a lot of people's hopes were dashed, and all of that energy started to die right back down, like she'd never even existed. Sometimes even worse, like it was her own fault for having died, since someone who made it that far, I mean… if someone from District 3 could do that with no training, what could we be doing if we hadn't - led by her - fought the construction of the Center so hard?

People forget, Mezzi always liked to remind us, just how many of the trainees she killed before she met Manari.

One thing people don't forget, or at least, I realized I definitely hadn't, looking at a sketch of it pinned to the board, was the IED she built in the arena.

"Mez," I said quietly, taking a step back, having forgotten everything else, all of the rest of it, as the pieces of what was being planned in the next bedroom over clicked into place. "Whatever you're planning… you gotta know, they have surveillance and stuff, you're the one who told me about that, if _I _can hear you from the _next room_..."

"Don't worry about it."

"Mez. _Mezzi_… they can hear you!"

"It's none of your business, JJ," he said, his tone just as soft and serious as mine, the room gone quiet. "This isn't you. It's all me. Sorry I kept you up. Go to bed."

Penrose shot me an apologetic expression as he put an arm around her shoulders.

"If I don't see you tomorrow morning…" I started.

"Crush it in District Eight for me," he replied. "You know the drill. Represent, make a difference."

"Yeah."

"I know you're gonna make me proud. I'm telling you, get some sleep. Big stuff coming tomorrow, huh?"

There was, indeed, big stuff to come the next day.

Suitcase in hand, I made it to the train in time. Said goodbye to a quiet house.

I spent a day on the railway to our destination, and then all of half an hour in District 8.

The sky was cloudy, strangely hazed with air pollution in a way that we've been working on reducing in Three. The buildings were grey, aging, like the life had been sucked out of them a long time ago.

On the platform, I was told by a pair of helmeted Peacekeepers that I was needed back in Three for questioning.

The next train to arrive took me home.

Big stuff indeed.

They might as well not have questioned me - I truly didn't know a thing more than anyone could have guessed from what actually went down. To the best of my knowledge, the best of _anyone's _knowledge who walked past the Justice Building within about a week or so of that night, explosive devices were detonated deliberately with the intention of both destroying some of the building's aging facade and, apparently, breaking in to locate the Tessarae records with some plan of… something to do, probably, with the conviction that they'd been being rigged.

I told three different Peacekeepers that I wasn't privy to my brother's plans, that the rest of us weren't, either, that I didn't know any of his friends, that I hadn't ever heard or seen anything, possibly ever in my life.

The 'totally ignorant' act would have worked better if I hadn't spent the month leading up to it, in the process of my application, trying to convince everyone in earshot of my competence and capability. Nice. But eventually, I think they realized there wasn't much else to wring out of me.

Supposedly, the day went like this.

Shortly after sunset, a well-financed and highly-professional team of terrorists attempted to infiltrate the Justice Building using improvised explosives. Luckily for all involved, despite their devastating capability to go totally unnoticed, they accidentally detonated one of their devices in the process of breaking in, killing some, injuring others.

Officially, that's what happened.

The 'shrapnel' that rendered Mezzi comatose left suspiciously bullet-shaped marks.

When I first came to visit him, immediately after I was released from questioning, the hospital room still had the scent of whatever they'd used to make the bombs.

He was just as silent then as he is now, save for the sound of the ventilator, the beep of the monitors. Early morning, before school. I'm not sure why I felt such an impulsive need to check in on him, but at the same time, when I already do on most weekends, why it had to be right away, but I know exactly why I'm here. The announcement last night. The Games are coming back.

Wondering, mostly, what he'd have to say about that, since it's been two years since I heard him say anything.

I'm not sore about being stuck in Three, really. It's not a bad place to be stuck. I like my work, and I like my friends, and I love my family, every part of it that's left.

Rather than char and rubble, t just smells like saline and a sort of acetous back-note of some kinds of drugs, the fresh plastic tubing from the latest IV nutrition supplement. Mezzi's hollowed out, barely recognizable after so long. But I figure he'd want to know, if he could hear me, and I don't know enough about comas to really know whether he can or not, and it feels right, and…

Before I can get any of it out, though, there's a quiet knock on the door.

"Early for visitors," Mayor Rhodes says, opening the door carefully and closing it behind him.

I've never actually met him in person, just seen him onstage or on a screen, heard Mezzi rail about something or another that he did. He's shorter in person, almost young-looking. Like, younger than my parents. Most notably, one of his arms is mostly-missing, a tangled web of black scar tissue protruding slightly from beneath the tailored sleeve of his suit jacket.

"Ah," I say hesitantly, edging unconsciously between him and my brother's bed. "Good… good morning?"

"You're a very dutiful brother, you know," he observes. "A very regular visitor, here."

"Family's… important?" I agree.

"My brothers were killed in the rebellion. While I was tending to the wounded, they were slaughtered in the streets. I wish there was a bed somewhere that I could visit, to speak to them again. I wonder what they'd think of the end of this. The finale. I imagine that's why you're here?"

I blink, disoriented, thoughts still blurred slightly by just how early it is.

"Not that I don't appreciate it, ah, Mr. Mayor, but you're right, I was really just hoping to talk to my brother alone. And I'm kind of… confused, right now."

"I'm sorry, Jaego, you must miss him terribly."

"Whoa, how do you know my -"

It's like an icy bucket of water has been tipped over my head. Confirming everything Mezzi ever warned me about surveillance, every piece of advice he never took for himself...

"Please listen for a moment," he interrupts. "I'd rather not turn this into something agonizing when it doesn't have to be. I'm here to make an offer to you, an exemplary student of District Three, with a heavy heart but an open mind."

"Um, what?"

"I'm going to encourage you to volunteer for the Hunger Games. There will be benefits if you choose to do so, and costs if you don't. Who better than you to represent us, put a good face on our district in the final Games?"

I glance nervously at Mezzi.

"You have a lot to lose, Jaego."

"That's kind of why I wasn't planning on volunteering," I say, grimacing at my own tone, wondering if I might be channeling Mezzi, somehow, since surely I'd never say something like that to the _mayor_.

"Much to gain, too. Perhaps don't think of it as a punishment," he suggests, one corner of his mouth tugging up in a smile. "You've done nothing wrong, after all. Bad luck is all it is. You would have made a great ambassador, and think of it this way - you still will."

I feel myself nodding along, though my mouth is too dry to speak. Wondering at how quickly the world can crash down around your ears, like it did when I realized what they were building, on the platform in Eight, now…

How helpless it all is.

If my comatose brother hadn't taught me that before, I'd be in for far more of a surprise.

"Isn't what what Mezzi would have wanted? Represent. Make a difference."

Sometimes I wonder.

x

Buzz Fabry, District 3

"It just wasn't the right fit," I tell my case manager, fidgeting on the edge of my seat.

She sighs, long and indulgent.

"Baby, I know, and that's hard, but maybe it'd be a better fit if you made any effort whatsoever."

"I made an effort!"

I made plenty of effort, to tell the truth. Perfectly decent couple trying to foster three kids at once, that's all fine and good. Biting off more than they could chew, the way the younger fosters usually do, like they think this is how they're gonna save the world. The food was pretty decent, actually. I knew from the second I passed the threshold that they had money, connections, that kind of thing. It was too nice of a place, in too good of a part of town. And that made it pretty clear what I was dealing with.

Judging by the other kids they'd picked up, Breaker, three years younger than me, and Concata, two years older, they'd been going for high marks in school. You're allowed to do that, pick up kids based on how smart people think they are. So maybe I should have been flattered.

_Two other kids_, though!

"Which part was the effort, hm?" she asks, flipping through my file. "Unlicensed use of a government official's computer? Tampering with property?"

"Didn't _know _he was a government official," I complain.

At first, at least.

Just knew he was kind of an asshole when I asked if I could see the build of his computer, still trying to pick up some tricks and stuff to deal with mine, make it better, and he gave me the complete brush off. I don't think they've figured out just how much to the guts of his build (like he built it himself, yeah right) I switched out with mine, but that was well after I _asked _him to show it to me and he laughed it off. I _tried _first.

That's called 'making an effort'.

"...theft, Brooklyn. They can prove you stole from them."

"Buzz," I correct her. "My name's Buzz."

"Not legally, baby," she sighs. "Now, you got an explanation for the missing wallet?"

"Rebels broke in while we were asleep and ransacked the place," I suggest. "Probably after they overhead literally anything they said at the dinner table, it was pretty awful stuff."

"If you were willing to tell them where to find it…"

"You know, I super-completely-totally would, if I knew. Luckily, I don't know anything at all!"

"So you're not going to try," she say. "Look, you've got time to turn this around. You're thirteen. You're clearly a bright kid. But you're gonna wind up in jail or on the streets if you don't figure out…"

"I know my own deal," I say, sharply, not wanting to hear the rest of that sentence, not really fearing it but hating the idea, knowing that the consequences of my actions are something that I can't avoid growing into.

"Br-... Buzz," she says, and I relent, just slightly, since, I mean, it's nice to hear my own name.

I picked it out myself, since the one they gave me at the home, when I got dropped off who-knows-when by no-one-knows-who thirteen years ago, is completely lame and doesn't mean anything and it's just stupid, okay? It's just stupid that a bunch of random people got to pick what I'm called forever.

"Do I have to do anything, y'know, to make up for it?" I say, trying to flutter my eyelashes innocently, aware that this tactic gets less effective with every passing month.

The case manager sighs.

"Just promise me that if there's a next time, you'll try. People want to help you, obviously. The setup seemed great - your friends Breaker and Concata, you know, _they_ haven't been displaced. I just thought this was going to be it for you, baby. I'm sorry."

"Oh, don't be," I say hastily, abruptly uncomfortable. "Not like it's your fault, I mean."

She closes my file with another slow exhalation, though less as sigh than a kind of calming, meditative breath. Mrs. Riggs really does her best to do right by us, and I know that, and half my lucky breaks have been through her, and absolutely none of it is enough to just… I don't know. I know I'm gonna keep messing up and disappointing her, probably until they day she dies of a stress aneurysm after walking in on me stealing parts from the home's television or something.

"Fine, off you go, get unpacked, I think you know where the rooms are by now," she says, sliding the file into the cabinet and summoning up a holo-screen to input the updated information on my whereabouts.

"Yes, ma'am," I say, trying to get her to smile, though she seems mostly uninterested, just waiting for me to get out the door.

"Just _try_ to get along," she calls after me, but I barely hear her, already lugging my massive duffel, more computer than clothing, up the stairs.

On my way out, I nicked some great stuff from the last foster. Like, screw those guys, but they had their hands in some really interesting pots, I think, and now the guy's got my old wiped hard drive where his used to be, and I've got basically a terabyte of fun new stuff to dig through and parse out and clean up into something that might be worth something to someone, most importantly me. Among other stuff. I figure after all I've been through, I was totally due a boosted processor and a new graphics card, even though I don't usually do that kind of stuff.

I've got friends, _ish_, sort-of-friends who are interested in anything I can get them. Older kids who've since left the home with real connects, to people with their own money and their own plans who'll fork it over for anything resembling a blueprint or a schematic or a travel itenary, and I've gotten good at figuring out where to look for those. Figure if I can get past the encryption, which I usually can, after a few years of messing around at every possible opportunity, the hard drive will basically be a gold mine.

I also happen to know - sorry, Mrs. Riggs, I'm really in here lying - my last foster home totally had something to do with the mayor's office, in the 'coming Games' sort of way, and I bet if I can dig deep enough to find anything on that, it's be worth a damn nice new monitor. Maybe I could even get ahold of an unmodded holo-tablet, really sort out what the deal with those things is, since at the moment, my tech experience is limited by what I can get ahold of and what I can afford, which is limited by what I can carry and where the five-finger discount is accepted.

For the moment, the room where I usually live, shared with three other girls in the twelve-to-fourteen range, is empty. School's about to get out, though - I just happened to miss it today, after being hauled back to the home like some kind of criminal after a night of my foster mom losing her mind about the wallet I lifted out of her purse. Somehow that takes precedence over my education, which is dumb, and the dumb-ness of it all was something I reminded the Peacekeepers involved of at length.

As I unpack my stuff and reassemble my computer, I take a few intermittent breaks to snoop around in my roommates' stuff, since they won't be back too soon. Partially to confirm who I'm rooming with, since who's where changes periodically in the home, and partially to see if there's anything worth taking, which there is.

Sereen, who I recognize by the little hand-carved wooden box she keeps tucked under the foot of her bed, always has a handful of hard candies lifted from one teacher's desk or another, so I take two of those, just the right amount to stay inconspicuous. I shove one under my own mattress once I have it dressed, and pop the other in my mouth, for a distraction as I put the disassembled pieces of my computer back together. Most other people don't have anything especially worth knowing about, but it's good to have a basic lay of the land, I think.

By the time they make it back from school - I get an early warning as the front door of the home opens and a deluge of voices and movement comes pouring in, _thanks, thin walls_ \- I've got my computer up and running, though the single light in the middle of the room is dimmed by the abuse of the shoddy public-services wiring system.

As Sereen, Bola, and Optine crowd into the room, I'm frowning my way through the first layer of security on the hard drive, scrounging through a pocket full of flash drives full of code from previous attempts to crack into things I wasn't supposed to be messing with.

Flash drives are very small, fit well in the palm of a hand, very easy to steal.

"Look who's back," Bola announces, sounding very not excited to see me, which is pretty typical. "Hear we've got a fourth roomie, again."

I ignore her completely, which is the best call with this sort of thing, since I've kind of learned the hard way that, left to my own devices, once I start speaking up, I'm really really good at making situations worse.

"Brooklyn. Yo. What happened?" Sereen follows up. "Thought you were out."

That's enough to make me look up and frown.

"Buzz," I say.

"Nah," Sereen says, crossing her arms, smiling like she knew that was the exact way to tick me off. "Says 'Brooklyn' on the announcement we got this morning."

I grind my teeth and try to go back to the problem at hand, an unexpected twist in the encryption that's made my first two keys fail. If I had an extra port, I might be able to combine them, but I lost my additional two USB drives in the last move, and I haven't had time to figure out how I'm going to get my hands on new ones.

As long as I don't squirm and make myself a good target, the other girls don't actually care that much about me until they realize I've stolen their snacks or whatever. Fun as it can be to do exactly that and get into a good sparring match with Sereen or Bola, I really want to focus on my drive, for the moment, so I ignore a few more barbs until Optine blessedly intervenes, complaining that my computer is making the room too hot and suggesting they go bother someone else.

Well, not in quite so many words, but that's the implication.

Most of the other people in the home are perfectly smart, in their way. Some are actually very smart. Metric aged out of being allowed in the home two years ago, but him and some of his friends taught me pretty much everything about computers, starting out as a joke, but in the end, it's become kind of my whole thing.

I maybe could have been happy at the foster home, if they hadn't had windows that didn't open, to keep the air conditioning in. If they hadn't kept me from going out to see him.

Now, once I get frustrated enough with decryption, which has never been my best area, I get right back to thinking about him, how he probably has some extra ports I can borrow and maybe even some advice for getting past the weird first layer, which keeps terminating my keys even though I've definitely safeguarded them against error-generating terminations, so I can't for the life of me think what must be the problem.

Why deny it? Metric and a few of his friends are basically the only people who've ever made me feel smart, helped me learn how to do something that actually matters, not just dumb stuff I'll only ever use if I get a stupid job somewhere and have to bend over a motherboard for the rest of my life or something.

We're not really supposed to learn software this early, I think, and that's why it's so fun.

Pulling one over on 'em, I mean, I get it. I get why there's so much general not-happy sentiment kind of swirling through the district. There's a lot to not be happy about, lately. A lot of stuff going on that we're not seeing.

Right now, though, I care a lot more about scooping up my stolen graphics chip, knowing Metric will appreciate it more than I will, and be more inclined to help me if I come with a present. And I also care a lot about shimmying down a crumbling drainpipe, just down from the second floor, landing safely in the just-rained-yesterday mud, and scooting off a few streets down. Very little, honestly, about what's to come with the Games.

The subsidized housing isn't too far from the community home, and it's frankly in an even worse state, all falling apart and stuff. Like half of Metric's deal is playing games on the internet with Capitol people and trying to con them out of money through some in-game system, and the other half is something even sketchier, I think, which is super cool.

He doesn't open his door, though by the sound of things, he's home and playing his usual game, something to do with driving cars through simulations of old arenas that everyone from the Capitol absolutely goes nuts for. Built here in Three.

Instead, I'm greeted by his boyfriend, Atax, who's even older than he is and seems continually surprised by the fact that I'm allowed to hang around in what I guess is _his_ living room, too.

I push by anyway, before he can greet me, which isn't hard since I'm not super big.

"Metric!" I call. "I gotcha something!"

"Hey, is that Buzz?" he replies, loud enough to hear from across the flat. "One second."

Atax and I spend a few awkward seconds pointedly not looking at each other. There's a lot of gear in their living room to look at instead, luckily. Some of it I don't even recognize, not far enough along in school for that.

"So," Atax says. "How's life?"

"Fine, I guess," I say.

"Haven't seen you around lately. You get picked up?"

"Fostered."

"Oh."

"And _un-_fostered, so I'm back," I add, feeling a little less proud of it now that I've put a few blocks between me and the community home, now that I'm remembering what it's like to be in a house without climate control.

"...condolences?"

Luckily, Metric interrupts before anything gets any weirder, his headset swinging around his neck, the cord dangling carelessly.

"What's up, Buzz?" he says. "Did you get me something nice?"

"Graphics card," I say, tossing it to him.

He catches it easily, whistles as he holds it up to the weak light coming from an exposed bulb overhead.

"Some _nice_ shit. Who'd you steal it from?"

"Foster dad."

"Nice, fuck a foster dad," he says, giving the chip another glance and stuffing it in his pocket. "What can I do for you?"

"Well, it's not all I took," I say. "Got a shiny new hard drive, too. He thinks I just wiped his, but I switched 'em, actually."

"Ooh. Who's he, by the way? Anyone who'd have my name on a list?"

"Probably. Last name 'Cantilever'?"

This ignites a lot more of a reaction than I was expecting, not knowing, myself, pretty much anything about district politics.

"Come on, couldn't you have come here and told us that _before_ you got kicked out? Fuck, we coulda used you to poison them or just stab them or some shit, that would've been great," he sighs, shooting Atax a look. "Tell me about the hard drive."

"Super encrypted. Having trouble with it, like, _that_ level of encrypted, y'know?"

"What computer?"

"One in his office, he sometimes forgot to lock the door."

"Shit, dude. You didn't happen to bring it with you, huh?" he suggests.

"Maybe take a step back before you start telling this shit to a thirteen year old," Atax cuts in, a little scathingly.

"Aw, Buzz isn't thirteen, she's an old soul, huh, Buzz?"

I can feel my cheeks getting warm at the thought. Yeah, exactly, he's exactly right, and Atax can go take a walk off a bridge if he wants to mess with me, because I stole the hard drive, _he_ didn't. So _who _shouldn't get told shit, now?

"I got it all set up in my room back at the home," I say, adding… well, embellishing a little, for Atax's sake, "I've almost got it cracked."

Metric and Atax are practically mid-silent-conversation with the intensity of the looks they're shooting each other.

"You know…" Metric says, trailing off, "the Mayor's personal secretary almost definitely has some insight on the selection process for the volunteers stored somewhere on his hard drive."

"With what happened to Aramid and his crew -" Atax cuts in, "It's a risky time, Met."

"Uh, yeah, that's the _point_. Risky times, risky measures. How soon can you crack the drive, do you think?" Metric asks, back to paying attention to me, delightfully enough. "How can we speed you up?"

I give him a list.

One item on the list is a six-pack of technically-not-legal energy drinks, which I know he has, uses them to fight through the time difference to game with people all over, all through the night. I include that stipulation to get a read on just how serious he is.

Twenty minutes later, I'm trekking home with an armful of canned sugar-and-caffeine and a back pocket full of wires and new ports and a few custom keys Atax came up with a while back, supposed to be tailored to help break the typical government encryption.

So, serious, then.

It's legit stuff.

Weighed down by gear, it's a lot harder than usual to clamber my way up the drain pipe, but I manage, rolling into the room with a sigh of relief, dropping all the cans and wires in the process.

People have always been able to find reasons to treat me like garbage, whether or not I did it on purpose. I didn't have to steal anything from my parents to get them to ditch me in the community home, after all. I never did anything to Mrs. Riggs, other than be a little kid who needs her help, really, and she still butchers my name, year after year. No one really gets it.

Like, the other kids in the home should get it. But they don't, because they don't care about the kind of stuff I do, about getting out of here on our own terms. Not adopted into some stupid house with nice, clean carpets and cloth napkins just to pretend to be someone else, for someone else, on some stupid couple's terms.

Shuffling through the wires, I hastily reconfigure my setup, plug in some fresh commands and put one of Atax's keys into play along with mine. Line by line, the monitor displays the code as it runs through, piece by piece, no longer grinding to a halt with every piece of text designating an error.

The fan at the base of the tower whirrs, swirling hot and dusty air throughout the room.

Just as quickly, it all stops, goes quiet except for the hum of the monitor.

First layer? Done.

I crack open one of the energy drinks in celebration, nearly spitting it out as the thing fizzes unexpectedly on my tongue. That doesn't seem right.

But what _does _seem right, and far more familiar, is the second-tier encryption. I've seen this before, know which keys and commands will get me past it. _Now _who's just a dumb thirteen year old?

For a moment, at least, everything seems exactly right in the world. Here, doing this, I know exactly who I am, and exactly what I'm going to do. Like Metric's always saying about this stuff, the point doesn't have to be complicated. There's plenty of organizing going on in District 3, plenty of groups who'll be tripping over themselves to get ahold of these files if Metric and Atax are to be believed.

None of that's my job to worry about.

I take a sip of my energy drink, and it feels more natural, this time. Like I'm growing into myself. The point being, as always, to raise some hell, and let someone else handle the fallout.

For at least a few more years, safely ensconced in the home, no matter how Mrs. Riggs or anyone else feels about me and my bullshit, I'm consequence-proof.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol

His office was deceptively normal. She didn't know why she always expected people's living spaces to be so reflective of their characters; her sparse apartment was as much a disguise as her practical dress and careful avoidance of the spotlight. Almost anything could be manipulated to fit a character.

The evidence of manipulation was certainly there. Rhodes' desk was assembled with an assistive device, to compensate for his missing right arm, made conspicuous by his suit jacket tailored to reveal the stump, snaked with black scar tissue. His degrees, including a medical certification, hung in a place of honor on the wall.

And he was asking her to do something utterly ridiculous.

"No," she said, after a moment's thought.

"_Hard _no?" Mayor Rhodes asked, looking up from the newspaper propped up on his desk. "I don't see any reason to turn Mr. Lofton down. Clearly a fine young man. I hear you're looking for variety."

It sounded unnecessarily cold and clinical when he put it that way, she thought. Of course, as with any casting, variety was important. He didn't have to say it like that.

"I wasn't talking about Jaego Lofton, though I'm not sure I understand how you have him ready to volunteer," she said, after a pause.

"Redemption. Powerful. His brother…"

"Fine. I truly don't need the story, the profile you've already shown me makes sense," she interrupted.

Certainly, there would be more than enough time to learn about Jaego Lofton in the year leading up to the Games. Dwelling on it now seemed unnecessarily morbid. The headshot from his ID card on her clipboard showed him to be a slender young man, delicate-featured, good looking in a disconcertingly-young sort of way. Sixteen now, seventeen by the time the Games would roll around in the coming year. Nothing wrong with him that immediately jumped out to make the situation make sense. Had dropped out immediately from some Capitol-sponsored program years prior, but made stellar grades and, on paper, seemed almost alarmingly normal.

She supposed she must be missing something, and given Rhodes' predilections, it was probably something awful, but she couldn't work up the motivation to dig too much further into the file. Flipped down another page, so his warm brown eyes would stop staring up at her.

"You gave me a list," she clarified. "The vast majority of these girls are under sixteen. What are you playing at?"

Indignantly, he frowned up at her, reaching over to turn the page of his newspaper as though his only care in the world was some mildly offensive comment she'd just made.

"Presumably all other mayors received the same assignment," he said. "I only did what you asked. Wasn't the list what you requested? Ranked in order of preference, as well, if you want to work your way down, though any of them will do nicely."

"Nothing you say is going to make me believe you have a handful of fourteen year olds lined up to volunteer for the Hunger Games," she said sharply.

The first girl on the list, Brooklyn Fabry, was only thirteen. And she wasn't the only one, either. As young as they could possibly be, how utterly ridiculous, why and in what universe...

"Well, not precisely ready. Not just yet. With your approval, we'll secure whichever volunteer you - presumably acting as a representative of the President or Head Gamemaker Snow in this capacity - so choose. It'll be done."

A tightness rose in her throat as she looked back down at the names, ages, addresses. Not really knowing what most of the information meant, District 3's cultural specificity being a factor, though many of the candidates were sourced from areas with the same sector identification code.

"Why?" she asked, pointing at the first name.

The thirteen year old.

"Oh, a long list of reasons. We considered our options very carefully. This one is a bit of a nuisance - well, understatement - talented in school, compelling on a number of levels. She's also very young, as you've noticed. That's as much a reason as any."

Marina grimaced at the thought. Younger than she'd been, facing death all those years ago, locked in her own room. It seemed so depraved, hand-picking someone to die that young. Someone who didn't volunteer for it, who would have to be convinced…

No, it wasn't so different from what Claudia did in Two, what Sequin did in One. That was one of her most fundamental beliefs, something that she had to trust or all of this was for nothing - people had to be taught to want to harm others, and could be taught, as well, not to. There was no point in ending the Games if it wouldn't end the cycles of violence fraying Panem at the edges.

And to do that, to have peace, one of these girls would volunteer, and from the way that Rhodes had explained his selections, they had been chosen like animals for slaughter.

Was it really so much better to condemn an older child?

Well, on some level, it meant that they would be better-prepared, better-equipped to negotiate their way out of it…

"You chose for youth. What's _your_ rationale for that?" she finally asked.

"The directive, of course," he said politely. "This is a _casting_. You're intending to tell a story. What kind of story of the Games doesn't have a few innocents?"

He had her, there.

It had to be horrible. She knew that much for certain, and she'd thought about it, though as little as she could manage, about what that would mean for the volunteers. The stakes had to be high, the brutality had to be meaningful. An arena full of willing and intensely capable competitors was a spectator sport.

For a massacre, for something terrible, for a reminder of what they were leaving behind, something so difficult to watch that the taste left behind in the viewer's mouths was one of ashes…

"Choose whoever you like," she said. "Consider the list approved."

Mayor Rhodes clucked his tongue, smiling up at her with disarming familiarity.

"Ah, you know, I'm afraid the guidelines were very clear. I need formal approval. My role is submitting the list, your role is making the final selection. Unless you'd like to send out a revision of those guidelines, meet with me in a week or so, review the options again…"

The sheer thought of coming back, going over this again, confronting this again, made her blanch.

"Brooklyn Fabry, then."

Brooklyn Fabry, thirteen, soon enough to be fourteen.

"An excellent choice, and one I doubt either of us will regret," Rhodes replied with a smile. "And Jaego Lofton as well?"

She nodded.

"Wonderful. How pleasant to see you in Three, Ms. Trevino. I look forward to watching the Games this year - I've been told to set my expectations high."

"Head Gamemaker Snow is very capable," she said, a little stiffly, wishing she could leave her body, just for a bit, to escape the crawling feeling in her stomach.

"I hope so. You've all been working so diligently on this project. I do hope all will fall into place as you've planned."

The slippery sincerity with which he wished her well nearly made her laugh aloud, but she bit it back, handing him the list of names and profiles again.

"The Presidency appreciates your support. Take care, now," she said, simply, turning on her heel and making a hasty retreat, simultaneously wishing she knew what she was running away from and horrified by the prospect that she very much already did.

x

_Bopping along, just about ready with the blog - expect a link to that along with District 4's intros in the next chapter!_


	8. When, Not If (or, District 4)

When, Not If (or, District 4)

x

The earth  
as all sea, just like Ovid imagines it. The ocean  
as one gorgeous excuse for drowning. I feel  
like the water inside of me.

'Performance After the End of the World', Talin Tahajian

x

Tallulah Covel, District 4

"You looked good today, Lulu," the facilities manager - which is a fancy way of saying 'appointed Capitol guy from the tourism bureau who owns all of our asses and knows it' - calls after me as I hurry down the hallway, shucking off sodden pieces of my costume as I go.

"Fuck off, Tenor," I reply, pausing to detach the last of my tentacles from my suit and toss it at the whitewashed wall of the fluorescent-lit tunnel leading away from the performance chamber. While the pieces of the costume swirl and float quite menacingly behind me as I swim, once it hits the ground, it seems to deflate to a soggy heap. "Cast me as the fucking sea witch again next season, I dare you, asshole."

"With that attitude, I don't know how an audience is going to realistically see you as anything else. Hope you're planning on picking those tentacles up!"

He's really not the worst by any means. Actually puts up with a ton of bullshit from me, partially because I'm good at my job and he doesn't give too much of a fuck what we do so long as visitors don't complain, and partially out of what almost seems like a sort of fatherly affection for 'his mermaids'. Tenor's about half a million years old, hair too white to take dye, skin spotted and wrinkled from sun exposure beyond what can be easily erased in the Capitol without a prohibitively high bill. Used to be a Peacekeeper in Four, and got his foot in the door fast when the Presidency opened the borders to Capitol tourism.

I guess that's how he knew about Halputta Spring, rebranded as Blue Lagoon, though it isn't a lagoon - it's a _spring_, on top of a twisted nest of miles worth of underwater caverns, dark and clear and ice cold.

Some of the mermaids have contests to see how far down they can go, since most of us can hold our breath for upwards of three minutes. My record is a little north of four, and Epaulette could get past five regularly, before she came up too fast from the caves under the performance area and died of some kind of decompression sickness.

After her, Tenor laid down the law about dicking around in the caves, so I don't anymore. Not exactly how I want to go down, in the dark and cold and silence of the underwater chambers of the aquifers that supply District 4.

I don't really mind working here too much, though I'd mind it a lot less if I ever got a decent role in the daily shows. Dressing as a mermaid to get ogled by Capitol tourists, the only people who can afford the steep fees to get into the resort, isn't all that bad. What I really like, though, is the performance of it.

The first thing Tenor did when he bought the place was carve out an underground amphitheater, putting in a solid wall of glass to hold back the weight of billions of gallons of water, and lit the whole thing up blue, put in oxygen tubes so we can stay under for hours through full underwater ballets. The most popular of them, and the most frequently run, tells the story of a mermaid who wished for human legs, left her home, got her wish, and joined the 'human world'.

There's a sea witch involved.

For two out of four daily performances, I'm the sea witch.

All of my tentacles and most of the costume but the thermal undergarments ripped off and discarded haphazardly, I finish my interaction with my boss by flipping him off and hurry to the dressing room. I've got fifteen minutes to switch from my frightening waterproof stage makeup, intended to make me look about twenty years older and a fuckton creepier, into a soft and pretty look that'll pair with my cosmetic tail for terrestrial work.

My costume is actually a lot easier to get out of than most of the performance tails, since I don't have to unbind my legs once I leave the airlock and can just half-sprint to change, which is a necessary advantage given how much longer my makeup takes to remove. There are a few slightly-better spots to work hostess-position in afternoon shifts, and they go fast if you don't nail them down.

I'm one of the first people in the changing room, lit up harshly by the bulbs of twenty vanities in various states of disarray. Mostly the cast for the evening shows, just now putting on the more elaborate stage makeup. Marissa, the other sea witch, nods when she sees me enter the room.

"Where's the costume, Tally?" she asks, her own costume half-on.

As if in response, one of the avoxes that Tenor keeps on staff comes bustling in with an armful of black tentacles, and I shrug as Marissa sighs. She's about a decade older than me, and if the false sense of superiority helps her feel better about being on even footing, career-wise, with a seventeen year old high school dropout, that's her business.

"Here it is now," I observe brightly, picking up the pile of tentacles, drying them quickly and pinning them up on my costume rack, multitasking as my makeup remover sinks in on my face.

"Good crowd?"

"Tenor's in a good mood, so probably."

"You think the big announcement was keeping our numbers down?" she muses, shellacing a layer of dark grey paint on her cheeks, to give them the illusion of deep hollows called for by the haglike character. "My hosting spot was full for both shifts this morning."

Well, that sucks. We've been doing lackluster business for the last week or so, and the speculation is that most of the Capitol citizenry who normally frequent the resort were keeping close to home for the buildup to the finale. It's been almost like a vacation, fewer people trying to make conversation and asking for drinks. And it's not like I can see the smaller crowds watching the shows - what matters is the show I'm putting on, not necessarily who's watching.

Even when I'm wearing a second skin's worth of hideous facepaint. Even then, every second of it, the pure _performance_ of it, is more exhilarating than anything else in the world.

Three days out from the announcement that the 90th Games will be the last, and will include all volunteers, including two from the Capitol - which is lit, I guess - it seems the vacation is over.

Once my makeup has almost entirely melted off, I finish the job, rub my face raw with a rough towel, apply an equally thick layer of moisturizer to protect my skin, and stand beneath the drying station to get the water out of my waist-length hair. Which looks _great _underwater, but soaking wet, on dry land, is more likely to snap my neck with the weight of it than anything.

As I'm doing so, other members of my cast start filtering in, equally sodden, the lines of the compressive performance tails still etched in their bare legs, the chatter in the room growing louder with every passing second. Once my hair is dry, falling in a straight, black curtain to my hips, I flip it over my shoulder and hurry to reclaim my vanity, dabbing some glitter, mascara, and a few swipes of shimmer over the high points of my face.

All there's left to do is wiggle out of my thermal undergear and into my seashell top and cosmetic tail, which doesn't even really restrict my legs, just conceals them and forces me to hobble a little.

"I got section C!" I announce, hustling over to the holo-tablet by the door and gesturing in my code to ensure that my hours are getting logged. It's two in the afternoon; I'll be here until ten this evening, and as athletic as the last two years swimming and conditioning for hours a day has made me, I'm already tired.

"Fuck you," Nari complains, looking up from her dressing table.

Section C is the best - no families, since it's open alcohol service, in a region with a population of friendly manatees and a manmade white sand beach. It attracts guests looking, more often than not, for peace and quiet and occasionally a lot of drinks. A few lonely older guys, but that's honestly a relief from the monotony of a long shift.

Since I've been working at the resort, I've lost whatever minimal sense of fear or limits regarding other people I used to have. I'm a fucking mermaid. My abs cast shadows. I can hold my breath twice as long as most distance runners could hope to, can bend myself into pretzels - I'm born for this sort of stuff, to be seen and admired and adored.

"Change faster next time if you want the spot so bad," I shoot back at Nari, making sure to flip the glossy blue fin of my tail on my way out, just for her.

Then I awkwardly waddle the rest of the way out, blessedly out of sight fairly quickly as the door swings shut behind me.

An attendant avox, reading the assignment I've punched in on her tablet, ushers me through the catacombs beneath the resort to a tube that will bring me up to the surface in my assigned sector. I try not to look at her too closely as she helps me get the entirety of my tail inside of the platform; Tenor's use of avoxes kind of freaks me out, honestly, but I know they make cheap labor or whatever.

Still really uncomfortable to see the set of their jaws and know there's not a tongue under there, you know? Not a good feeling.

The plate brings me spiraling up to the surface, and the first rays of the afternoon sun on the sweltering day are actually a temporary relief from the chilly bleach-scented moisture of the tunnels. Like Marissa warned me, all of the positions are already occupied. I'm set up on a rocky outcropping on the shore, and eight tourists in my field of view will be my responsibility for the next few hours.

What follows is putting on as much of a show as I do dancing and twirling underwater.

"Good afternoon!" I announce, feeling my voice turn as sweet and bell-like as I can make it, ringing over my vowels with practiced care and letting my tone lilt invitingly towards the end.

People who actually know me find this the most disturbing part of my work. The easiest way to mess with my parents, when I do run into them, which isn't often since I've been rooming with other girls from work since I fucked off and dropped out of school two years ago, is to use my mermaid voice. It absolutely freaks them out.

It's not that I don't have a nice voice, but what sounds 'pleasant and inviting' to Capitol tourists comes off a little peculiar to people who are used to me helpfully dropping profanities to punctuate every other sentence.

"My name is Mermaid Tallulah, but you can call me Lulu, or Tally, or Tal, or… well, we'll have plenty of time to make friends!" I say, making a sound that could only be described as a giggle, which would be much to my chagrin if I had any sense of shame.

It's not so much that I had to get rid of the shame, and more that it was never there. I've always been good at this. A consummate actress, if not especially notable in most of the ways that matter in District 4, never much for mucking around in fish guts or committing to the kind of math shit you have to know to get a navigational job or do any kind of managerial work. I just like to be seen. As anything, really.

"Now, can I get anyone's drink orders?" I suggest, glancing around to verify that a few tourists look interested.

After tying my hair up, which takes a while, in a single, fluid motion, I roll off the rocks and into the vibrantly blue water, keeping my face above water to avoid wrecking my hair and makeup. What follows is absolutely the easiest part of work, swimming around in my tail, teasing a couple of elderly people here, a nervous-looking young man there, about their drink orders and the weather and the news and whatever else they seem to want to talk about. Playing the friendly mermaid, the sort of person they want to believe populates District 4, where we're all so gorgeously tan and ebulliently overjoyed to wake up every morning and go to some fishery job in a sleepy little coastal town and feed the country.

In reality, it's all based on acting, like most things.

I really think there's not much to learn from something like 'school' other than what you can get out of your interactions with people. That's how you learn to be something more than yourself, which inevitably means something other than yourself. Not a bad thing. Just a totally neutral thing.

No one worth being is the same person they were when they exited the fucking womb, after all. 'Tallulah' is the name I picked to stand out after my parents chose one that everyone has, with the express intention of making me fit in. 'Moira'. Two Moiras from District 4 have died in the Hunger Games since the Mockingjay Rebellion ended. It'd be a cursed name if it wasn't just so fucking common.

There's nothing common about me. I'm not just from the coast, and I'm not just from inland, even if my parents are determined to never actually strive for anything in life - I will. I always have.

A few of the tourists are interested in talking about the Games, which figures. I've been kind of waiting for that over the last few days, though I guess, like Marissa said, most of the in-the-loop Capitolites actually wanted to be home to see the fireworks in person.

"You must have trained," one middle-aged woman with eerily shiny rose-gold hair insists as I pick up a maitai from a collection of rocks, ferried up by avox bartenders below-deck, and swim it over to her, which never fails to drive first-timers wild. "I can't even imagine the kind of strength it takes, this kind of thing…"

"Come try the water if you like!" I recommend brightly. "We all train in high school, but this is more my dream. Every day is paradise here."

"Oh, but wouldn't that be something! A mermaid in the Games, I can't imagine!"

"Well, I can't say I don't miss it sometimes," I admit, feeling myself slip a little bit, out of my usual work headspace, which works best when cleared away of baggage from the past. "But this is just as fun."

Surely.

She sincerely giggles, taking the drink and waffling a bit about how she can't get her hair wet, but the water looks so lovely.

It's mostly the truth, what I'm saying. We do train, some more seriously, some less seriously, the same way kids in other districts have phys ed and field days. I was kind of a late bloomer growth-wise, not to mention always more interested in cracking jokes and making a delightful fool of myself than actually getting into the weapons-handling thing with any kind of seriousness, so I don't miss it _too_ much.

More the _idea_ of it than anything. If there were a way to cut the line somehow, if I could have willed myself into the kind of person who gets to volunteer without putting my head down, shutting up, and working my way up to bench two-hundred or whatever, I'd have done it in a flash.

But the thing is, it's a miserable and boring process, even if the payoff, the Games, is a captivating kind of fantasy for me. Like I said, the performance is ultimately what matters. And if I can paint myself into a fucking sea witch every day to be gawked at for hours, surely I could do whatever the Capitol wants.

...not to mention, now, more as a side effect of work than anything, I have the necessary muscle.

I guess I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking about it, with the announcement and all.

Other guests weigh in, one of whom claims that they're some kind of tech on the Gamemaking staff, though it's hard to tell through their mouthful of silver fangs.

As the sun begins to sink lower, a few of the guests meander back to villas in sight of the water until only one remains, a man in his thirties who's been intermittently napping and reading something on a holo-pad, polite but mostly cursory in accepting no fewer than five pina coladas.

Flipping out of the water now that I no longer have a full sector to wait on, I let my hair tumble down and assume a sitting position on a conveniently located rock that gives me a good vantage point on my last guest.

He's pretty normal looking, after the rest of them. Kind of familiar, now that I'm not being distracted by so many other competing demands on my attention, tapping in drink orders on the flesh-colored keypad attached to my tail. I squint at him, waiting to understand where I know him from. Some kind of announcer? Celebrity?

"Usually mermaids aren't so stare-y," he observes abruptly, his voice coming out far more acidic now that he's not asking for a drink.

I very nearly fall off the rock, startled, having assumed - stupidly, I guess - that he was napping behind the sunglasses.

Was he watching the whole time?

"Gazing longingly is a very mermaid-y thing to do," I suggest, struggling out of my mild surprise, trying to pull my tone back to its semi-musical all-fake quality.

"Oh, the makeup's not fooling anyone," he sighs. "You're, what, seventeen? Redirect that _longing_ somewhere useful. Perhaps bringing me another drink."

I frown.

"Another pina colada, Mr…"

"Jeez, do I need to be doing more youth outreach?" he complains, taking off his sunglasses and abruptly becoming much more familiar as I register his disconcertingly blue eyes. "I guess I'm already doing dead fucking zero, so probably."

This is Neveah Laurence, our only victor.

For a second, I hope I haven't offended him.

Then I recollect myself, remember that, of the two of us, I'm the one who's a goddamned mermaid.

"The pina colada is on the way, Mr. Laurence," I say cheerfully. "Sunglasses threw me off."

I tap the code in, and a few seconds later, the drink materializes in a slot in the rock beside me. With a touch of melodrama, I take the delicate glass and roll down, landing easily on the sand without spilling a drop.

He ignores my excuse, but nods appreciatively as he receives the drink.

"You wanna hear some bullshit, Tally, or Lulu, or whatever?"

"_Always_," I say, accidentally slipping into a voice that sounds much more like one I might conceivably use without a tail on.

Neveah laughs, as though he knows as well as I do that I've tipped my hand, my hand being 'genuine interest in his likely involvement in the Games'.

"I'm not mentoring District Four this year," he says, taking a long drink.

"Who is?" I ask quickly. "I mean, where will you be?"

He quirks up an eyebrow.

"Look, I'm paid to give a fuck about you, so I give a fuck," I say, deciding in a split second that marginally-sincere-Talullah is probably going to get me a better tip from this particular man than mermaid-Tallulah. "But I do have vested interest in Four, y'know?"

"If I told you it was anyone in particular, would you volunteer?" he asks curiously.

"...well, not _just _for that," I say with a laugh. "I dunno if I'm ever going to catch back up with training, and I'm not desperate to make a fool of myself when I've got such a decent gig going on here."

"Trust me, you couldn't make more of an idiot of yourself than our last few volunteers," he sighs. "And I'm in Three, as I'm sure you're desperate to know. There was a lottery to determine our placements, _ostensibly_, but I'm fairly certain someone in the Capitol is just trying to punish me for something."

"Huh," I say.

"Just about my response," he observes, setting his head back on his chair with a long and near-supernaturally exasperated noise. "God, the whole thing is so fucking exhausting. Anyway, you want to know what mentor could be waiting for you behind door number one? I heard you talking to shiny-pink-hair over there."

"I wasn't going to…" I begin to say.

"I volunteered myself," he interrupts. "Obviously. In no position to judge. I'm just making an observation. Seemed like you were interested."

"...maybe," I say, more hesitant about the word than I have been about anything in a long time.

"Anyway," he says brusquely. "You know who they gave my job to? Saxaul Eslami. Motherfucker."

Not just any motherfucker, really. There're a lot of victors who clearly never gave what they'd do next a second thought. He sometimes seems like the only one who's really had a plan and stuck to it - utter chaos, a scandal every two weeks, like clockwork, though gone a little quieter lately. Also one of the only ones who's stayed famous, like 'even my bland-ass parents talk about him over the breakfast table' famous.

Neveah must be able to see that I'm interested, because he sits up slightly, propping himself on an elbow, transparently making an effort not to slur his words. Even so many drinks in, there's an unmistakable glint of something inscrutable in his vividly blue eyes.

"We don't have a girl lined up yet, y'know."

x

Moises García, District 4

"Anything worth knowing?" my mom asks, leaning casually against the counter near the fridge, not looking up from her newspaper.

It's her way of saying a lot of things - in this case, I assume, 'good morning', 'how are you', 'what are your plans for the day' - but she doesn't expect a response unless I'm certain she'll care about the answer. A lot of our communication is about reading between the lines, not speaking up unless strictly necessary. Listening before you speak.

The problem when two people are listening and neither is speaking is that there's never a lot of purchase for anyone to connect.

I do have news, though, from the previous evening, when I came home late from an evening run and missed dinner, as I usually do. The housekeeper continues, dutifully, to lay out meals for two. Most nights, the food ends up stone cold in the trash.

"Neveah's tapped a female volunteer," I say. "Someone from outside of the Center."

"That makes sense. Little enough talent within it," she says stiffly, closing her paper, folding it neatly, setting it beside her. I have her interest, now, though.

She doesn't need to ask, just to tilt her head slightly.

_Go on._

"Tallulah Covel," I say, searching her dark eyes for recognition, satisfied that none is immediately forthcoming and I'll need to offer more detail. "A dropout. Recruited from Blue Lagoon. I understand she's a…"

I pause before I actually say it, waiting to see if I won't have to.

"One of the mermaids," I finally say.

My mom sighs.

"Isn't that just like Neveah. The man loves his mermaids. Nothing else?"

"Nothing else."

"Be smart today," she tells me, which, when she says it, means 'have a good day' and 'best of luck' and 'I love you'. It doesn't have to mean 'unconditionally' to be true.

For now, I deserve it.

I nod shortly, find the packed lunch prepared by Mrs. Clarke, who must be off dealing with my grandparents, since she hasn't come by to see us off this morning. My grandfather managed to come down with a cold, somehow, despite the fact that he and my grandmother haven't left the house in about half a decade.

Mom blames Mrs. Clarke. She may be replaced soon, but doesn't know it yet.

The Sunday morning light is grey and muted by thick cloud cover outside, threatening a drizzle of rain. A pair of umbrellas wait by the door - I consider them, but the walk isn't too long and I weigh the inconvenience against the potential benefit. It's not as though there are thunderheads crowding the horizon. Just a haze of grey fog, more or less.

I offer the empty living room a half-bow, just in case, and leave the umbrellas behind.

My walk to the Center is damp but uneventful. We live about as close as anyone in the district does; that's by design. My grandfather built the house in this particular location when my mother's eldest brother was born, intending to see him volunteer or die trying. He managed to do both by the time he was eighteen. Then, it was personal - it was my mother's turn.

The quarter quell robbed her of her year to volunteer, and the perfidy of the rebels in Four, from Victor's Village to the dregs of the coast, plunged the district into darkness, buried it in rubble, allowed us to be left to rot. I'm not certain who my father was, but I gather he was one of our liberators from Two, in the rare moments that my mom mentions him. Or at least, a little less than eighteen years ago, after the first of the revived Games was won and Finish Ardell of District 1 was crowned, I was born.

Everything since then has been personal to her, particularly matters of my upbringing and education. So I appreciate the distance she puts between us, knowing that she cares deeply but tries to protect me from just how much of our family's hope depends on me.

Starting in lukewarm pinpricks, the rain has begun in earnest by the time I make my way to the main room of the Center, one of the newest buildings in the district, hastily erected post-Rebellion, in which the original cavernous structure was razed after it was appropriated as a rebel hospital. A shame. My mom has stories of her time in that building, the larger-than-life victors we used to have, all dead, ground into dust like the Center and the memories.

Already, a few other people are milling about. Mostly kids from the coast who probably don't have anywhere else to go on a rainy morning like this and took a bus in, or else made the several-mile run themselves. Several instructors, though there aren't really enough of us present to take instruction.

Almost-senior-for-all-intents-and-purposes instructor Skiff Grandin is doing pull-ups on a bar as Moira Mizushima, a first-year-pout, watches adoringly.

I heave a sigh, let my face go blank rather than react to anything going on around me, avoid even taking too much of it in, and head to the break room to put my lunch away.

There's a girl I don't recognize, which is new, and it actually takes a moment to figure out what or who I'm looking at as she digs around in the fridge, apparently looking for something. Her hair, extremely long, dark, and worn loose, falling into her eyes, both makes it obvious that I don't know her and difficult to see her face to confirm the suspicion.

After a moment's consideration, I cough to interrupt her and she jerks back by a few inches, locking eyes with me, holding a lunch bag.

"Can I help you?" I ask, after another pause.

"Dunno," she says. "Is this Skiff's lunch, d'you think?"

I blink.

"He usually has a plastic bag," I say. "Check for an unlabeled white one."

She nods appreciatively, returning the paper bag, marked with an illegible name, to the door of the communal fridge, back to shuffling through the lunches of everyone who's arrived thus far.

"Fucker asked if I was _lost_. Like I didn't go to fucking school with him four years ago, piece of shit. Who does he think he is?" she grumbles. "Figure I can get away with it if I just do it once. And I bet he packs a good lunch. _Fucker_."

"Are you hungry?" I ask.

"Yeah, I'm not used to… usually my work feeds us," she sighs, wrinkling her nose and flipping her hair back over her shoulder. "Hence the revenge-breakfast."

The pieces, already connected, fit together perfectly.

Tallulah Covel, the mermaid, the person who'll be volunteering with me. One first impression to make to make this work, to make everything the way it's supposed to be, whether or not Neveah's introducing a wild card to mess things up, as my mom seems to think.

Based on the immediacy with which she's taken to workplace theft, I don't think my mom was totally incorrect in her assessment, but I banish that thought immediately. Listen, don't make assumptions until you've listened.

"Split my lunch with me, then, I can head home and get more once we're on midway break," I offer, summoning up a smile.

"Huh," she says musingly, closing the fridge door, flouncing over - that's really the best word to describe the way she walks. "Whatcha got?"

"Picky," I say lightly, making sure I don't let my smile drop, so she knows I'm not actually being a dick, just messing with her - I figure that's her style, again, based on first impressions, but that seems like a pretty safe gamble.

"Shut up," she complains, but she smiles too, even moreso when I take a pair of sandwiches, a container of soup, and a parcel of cut fruit from my bag. "Fuck!"

I offer her a sandwich.

"I didn't have breakfast either," I say, as an invitation to eat, pulling out a chair for her first, then for myself at the dingy breakroom table.

Usually not a great bet to hang around too long in the kitchen in the mornings when my mom doesn't have work. Most weekends I go without. It occurs to me that this is a solution to a vague problem I've been ignoring for a while that may well have been affecting my performance negatively.

"Guess you gotta eat all this stuff to be so big," she observes, accepting the seat and tearing open the sandwich with surprising enthusiasm.

"Basically," I agree, relaxing my smile to get started on the soup.

"Thanks, uh -" she trails off, making a face at me, prompting my name.

"Moises," I say. "Moises García."

"Ooh," she laughs, almost choking on a mouthful of sandwich. "I've heard about you. Doesn't seem like half of it's true, though, huh?"

"Probably best to assume that everything you've heard is true," I reply with a shrug.

"Sure, so, then, not only are you an irredeemable elitist piece of shit, a kiss-ass, a likely-sadistic sociopath who may or may not be a serial killer, and in an incestuous relationship with your mom, you're a buff dude who's down to share lunch with someone he's never met."

"You pick things up fast," I say, actually laughing aloud. "Wow. How long have you been here, twenty minutes?"

"More like fifteen. I'm good at getting people to talk," she says, smiling through the sandwich. "Dunno if I told you, but I'm Tallulah. Most people use one nickname or another, but it's your call."

"Tallulah," I echo, back to smiling. "Well, nice to meet you. Planning on sticking around?"

"We'll see," she says. "Dunno if you've heard, but Neveah brought me in as a volunteer. Figure a lot can happen in a year, but might as well come out with it, be direct and shit."

"Recruited for your lunch-stealing skills?" I suggest.

She snorts.

"Neveah's got standards, I think. If it was lunch-thievery that got me in, I'd like to think I'd be better at it."

I crack open the container of sliced fruit, long pieces of golden mango and star-shaped cross-sections of carambola. It's a shame that Mrs. Clarke will probably be out soon. If there's anything I can say about her, it's that she makes good lunches.

"Fruit?" I offer Tallulah, and she whistles approvingly, taking hold of a mango section and popping it into her mouth.

"Heard some other rumors," she adds, watching me carefully for my response.

"I'm _not_ a cannibal," I say, very seriously, which makes her laugh.

"Shit, shouldn't have taken your sandwich!" she laughs, feigning horror. "Nah, I hear you're all set up to volunteer yourself. Have been for a long time."

"A lot can happen in a year," I reply, pulling back her words from earlier - people like it when you do that.

"Guess we're gonna find out just how much, huh?" she says, leaning back in her chair, propping up her feet on a different seat as she finishes the sandwich and takes another strip of mango.

With Skiff-typical timing, the door swings open to reveal our instructor, arms crossed and looking very displeased, though not quite as much as he might have been had we been eating his lunch rather than mine.

"Moises, man, the fuck," he says, frowning at me in particular, mostly ignoring Tallulah. "Warmup started five minutes ago. Off your ass."

I try to make a habit of treating Skiff respectfully - he doesn't have much influence over whether or not I make it to the Games, and I won't spare him another second's thought once I'm on the train, but his involvement in the Center means he has some control over how pleasant or unpleasant my everyday life is. So I stand up and half-bow, and usher Tallulah to do the same.

She doesn't budge.

Before the door closes behind him, still well within earshot, she announces, "you know, we could totally kill that guy, right?"

"...beg your pardon?" I say.

"It's just funny how the instructors they have in here pushing people around are just ex-trainee failures," she says, adding some volume to the last half of the sentence.

"Be careful," I caution her with a sigh.

"How come I gotta be careful?"

"They're not weak, and they are… angry. There's a lot of repressed anger floating around here. It's a consequence of ego and failure," I say.

One of many reasons I'm so careful not to fail.

"I'm not weak either," she says, balling up the paper wrapper from the sandwich. "Let's go work out or whatever, it's my first day and I know fuck all about how things have changed since I dropped out of school."

"You dropped out?" I ask, feigning surprise, rewrapping the second sandwich, sealing the containers of soup and fruit.

"Best choice I ever made," she says with a roguish grin. "But that's not saying much. C'mon, show me how a real trainee does it, I only got a year to catch up."

_A lot can happen in a year._

By fourteen or so, the number of casuals involved in training starts to drop off. Most schools in Four have gyms, but a lot of the work-week attendance in the Center is driven by either casual interest or morbid curiosity. Not at all like the situation in One and Two.

Or like the way it used to be.

Neveah's not around a lot, but I've had to talk to him a few times, in the process of nailing down my position as volunteer, getting official confirmation, that kind of thing. He's as much a departure from the old kind of District 4 tribute as our dimly-lit Center is from the dignified, professional space that existed here before the Rebellion.

I've seen his Games, after all. Everyone has. He's not exactly shy about sharing them with recruits, though I've noticed that he doesn't really watch himself, tends to zone out and look past the holo-screen, which is… interesting, because you wouldn't assume he's the kind of guy who could be upset by anything. Gratingly, obnoxiously superior at all times, always smiling like he has some kind of secret, which…

Victors are entitled to that, no matter how they win. I know that, but I don't have to like it, and I don't have to like him, but I do have to keep in his good graces enough to preserve my position, so the dance continues.

Tallulah follows me out to the gym, where Skiff and Moira are leading a ragtag group of about thirty trainees - no one under sixteen permitted in on weekends, which are supposed to be intensive training sessions - in a set of warmup stretches.

"Is this normal?" she whispers as we approach. "Like, is this the kind of training you guys always do?"

"In a word, yes," I reply, observing as I do that it's getting easier to match her tone and language choices.

"Eh, well, guess you can never have too much flexibility training," she sighs, and I show her where to find the mats and the disinfectant wipes, and we get to business, the same way I would any day, but pivotally different in so many ways.

I've been wondering for a while who my partner might be. There are a few solid performers in the sixteen-plus group, from whom the volunteer would have inevitably been selected had whatever business got Tallulah in here not happened. Most of the decent inlander girls wouldn't be caught dead actually going into the arena, though, leaving only a few _viable_ options - Araceli, who's in my year, but from the coast, still angry about pretty much everything, though she shows up to the Center even as she curses it, Neveah, and a long list of instructors under her breath whenever she gets the chance, or maybe Ursula, from the year below me, who has enthusiasm to spare but comes off a lot younger than sixteen.

Really, I should be grateful that Neveah managed to get someone in from out of the Center. I've known most of the people here for too long to like them in any meaningful way. Yes, a lot can happen in a year, but a lot more can happen in over a decade of enrollment with the same class, much of it unflattering in one way or another.

I'd like my partner to be someone who likes me.

I mean, ideally I'd like _everyone_ to like me, though that's not a very realistic goal. It's hard to turn it off, the desire to be exactly who anyone I'm talking to wants me to be, but it's important to triage this sort of thing, to prioritize the right people. Nevertheless, it's somewhat conscious, mostly unconscious, at this point - I actually have to be careful not to mimic people's accents back at them, since especially people from the coast can sometimes see that as mockery. Even though it's not, I'm just trying to be…

Something, definitely something.

Tallulah catches on to the rhythm of the class quickly, and while she glances at me fairly frequently to figure out what she's supposed to be doing, she doesn't ask questions. I like that, I think. My mom thinks that people who ask too many questions out themselves as unobservant, that most questions can be answered by paying attention and most mistakes are the product of failures to do so.

She definitely seems observant.

After a half-hour of stretching, weapons instructors have trickled in for the most part - spearwork is still empty, so the typical graduate trainer, there, Sora Peixoto, must be either late or taking a day off.

"What's next?" Tallulah asks, hauling herself up to disinfect her mat and hang it back on the wall as other trainees begin to scatter to the stations around us.

"Well, there are pairs stations and individual stations," I explain, gesturing around the room to indicate the color coding of various signs. "What do you need to learn?"

"Where's the one where we address the psychological consequences of murdering?" she says brightly. "Kinda wanna get that out of the way, you feel me?"

"Maybe you could _start _with swordwork," I suggest. "Didn't seem to have any problems threatening to kill Skiff, earlier."

"I got bused to a fancy inland school before I dropped out, if you knew him as well as I did, you wouldn't have a problem threatening to kill him either," she says, a bit darkly.

"Never said _I _had a problem," I laugh. "The question remains: do you want to do it with a sword, a bow, a knife, a blunt weapon…"

We wind up at swordwork after all, which is usually a pretty popular station. The instructor, Itsaso, is actually pretty helpful, though he's generally chilly around me. I think I must have made a misstep, said something a little too sharp about Renata, from the 89th Games, a few years back. I thought nothing of it, he thought everything of it, and now he thinks very little of me.

Which is sort of fair, since it's not like I wasn't speaking my mind. We had a very unfortunate duo for the 89th, and it's worth recognizing that an learning from it, that neither of them approached the Games right, that both of them deserved to die for it, as anyone would, failing so completely.

You joke about the things you fear. Failing, dying like that - killed by a scrawny little rebel from Three, for the love of all that's good! I wouldn't just be buried in an unmarked grave, I have no doubt my mom would have my body burned, scattered out at sea somewhere to feed a plankton bloom - it's worth fearing that sort of outcome.

Fear can and should be motivation. It is. Just quietly so, because it can be exploited as a weakness if one isn't careful.

I'm very careful.

Tallulah picks up a sword, clearly not for her first time, but without any of the comfort that even the least competent trainee should have by seventeen or eighteen years of age.

"Looks good. You're not _too_ out of practice, I guess," I comment, and she smiles, squaring her shoulders and looking far more like she belongs here, like the mild praise has changed something fundamental about the way she inhabits space.

Interesting.

I take the sword I typically use in training by the hilt, adopt the correct stance, and watch as she easily mimics me, slipping into an even more appropriate grip, foot position, posture.

Very interesting.

For a second, I'm consumed by the image of a mirror held up to a second mirror, generating infinite iterations of increasingly incomprehensible reflections. Glass pressed against glass. Nothing new created, but everything conserved.

"You remember any drills?" I ask, after watching her appraisingly for a second.

"Nah, teach me something new," she says.

That shouldn't be such a tall order for either of us, I think. We have a lot to learn from each other. A lot can happen in a year. There's a lot left to understand about myself, before I put myself in a position to kill someone else, to die, no matter how long I've already spent trying to come to terms with it.

Always something new to learn, if one is only willing to listen.

I think all that.

"Great," I say, simply. "Then let's get started."

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol

It was an odd location to hold a professional meeting of this sort, but she was grateful enough with the simplicity of what seemed to be the situation in District 4 that she would have entertained Neveah's request if it were to meet in a submarine or on top of a moving train.

Some kind of freshwater lagoon resort? She was hardly going to complain, not with two willing, competent-looking, fully-of-age tributes in a file in her hand.

He'd reserved some quadrant of the resort in its entirety for a few hours, and after ordering two drinks that came in coconuts, dismissed the youngish woman in her sparkly mermaid tail with the promise of a large gratuity for her good service.

"Interesting place," Marina commented, feeling somewhat awkward as she sat, straight-backed, on some kind of deck chair in her business-casual dress and tights, the sensible heels of her shoes sinking shallowly into the glittery white sand that comprised the artificial beach overlooking still, clear, impossibly blue depths of water.

"One of my favorites," Neveah replied. "Peaceful."

He started in on one of the drinks, and she eyed the other curiously, though he hadn't offered it to her. She didn't want to doubt his hospitality, but she also didn't want to assume. Neveah, as a mentor, had not been especially quick to try to get to know her. Most of what she knew about the older mentor suggested that he leaned towards Claudia's camp, had some kind of indecipherable relationship with Two in one way or another, which shouldn't make him all that amenable to liking her very much.

That, and her placement of him in Three, though she truly hadn't meant it as an insult.

Neveah was capable of being an excellent mentor. Panem had seen excellent results from Four, in the first few years of the reinstatement of the Hunger Games. As an absentee mentor, though, his tributes had struggled in more recent years, Renata and Angel being the most immediate legacy of a policy of minimal involvement. Both very dead, neither widely loved or especially remembered.

"I can see why you'd like it here," she said. "It's very private, too."

She'd done some reading on the resort before accompanying him there, just in case. Previously known as Halputta Spring, from a native Four word for the alligators that had inspired some of the mutts from the 89th, since wiped out from this particular area to make it suitable for tourists. Manatees, excitingly enough, still populated the spring, and from the information available on the website, she gathered there was a good chance she might see one.

That was exciting.

"Yeah, Blue Lagoon is the move," Neveah sighed, knocking back one coconut, ignoring the straw, and finishing the drink.

He picked up the second one almost immediately.

So they were both for him, then.

"How about Four's tributes?" she continued. "What's the move there?"

"As though it matters. You're handing them off to Saxaul as soon as you get the chance," Neveah sighed. "They're some of the best volunteers I've put together in years - Moises alone, honestly, but together I think they'll really be something to reckon with - and they won't even be mine."

"Good to hear-"

"I'm not done," he interrupted. "He's going to turn them into communists or some bullshit. If I see Moises in glittery pink eyeliner, I'll have a fucking _stroke_ on the spot, and then you'll have to find someone else to deal with District Three."

The older mentor glared at her, briefly, as though to emphasize the point. So now he _was _done.

"I suppose we'd have to replace you with Finish, then, and he wouldn't get a break this season after all," Marina sighed. "Is that all? Do you have any sincere concerns?"

"My volunteers -"

"Your volunteers, for now. In a year, they'll be Saxaul's volunteers. In the intervening time, it's your prerogative how to address any training or preparation you believe they ought to receive."

It was almost funny, how defensive the trainee district mentors seemed to get about Saxaul. Similarly, the only time she was aware of Claudia losing her cool, very nearly overplaying her hand… during the 87th Games, when Niagara and Saxaul had been making media forays, trying to turn the conversation around on District 2. When she'd killed Niagara to put an end to that quickly. The two of them together had made a sincere threat, and really, the planning, there, had all been Saxaul.

She knew that. They'd talked about it, in better times.

When she thought about how he must be doing, now, she remembered, painfully, how crushed he still was by how things had worked out all those years ago. How he must be thinking, now, of how similar the setup was with his run for office, his friendship with Cora - which of them would Claudia kill to end his momentum?

Probably neither. In all likelihood, she'd matured past impulsive neck-breaking in the past few years, knew that she couldn't maneuver her way through the scrutiny of killing a victor as intensely popular and widely beloved as Cora or Saxaul. There would be consequences. Claudia wasn't fond of consequences.

"Look, I don't know if you're the one behind this or not, but putting me in Three is about the stupidest move I've ever seen, and I mentored _Renata_, for fuck's sake," Neveah complained.

"Did you?" she asked, trying to keep the ice out of her tone, knowing it was a stupid thing to make an enemy over, but inexplicably angry on the long-dead young woman's behalf. "I don't remember your having been all that involved."

Neveah laughed ruefully.

"Perhaps not."

"There won't be any room for that this year," Marina warned him. "Every mentor will be called on to do their utmost to help their tributes, regardless of their district of origin. I know you have the ability to do this."

He made a noise that might have been a scoff or might have been a laugh - it was hard to tell precisely which.

"I imagine there are penalties if I don't."

"Of course," she said simply. "You assume correctly."

"Fun."

In another long gulp, he emptied the second drink.

"We can only hope," Marina agreed, still feeling buoyed by the relative moral straightforwardness of this setup, knowing where she stood and what she could to to make things better, if only incrementally, for the children volunteering in Three.

"Not just hope," Neveah sighed. "We can drink, too."

Reluctantly, she found that she quite agreed with him, on this, at least, if not just about anything else.

x

_Blogs take a long time. Still working on it, check my profile periodically, it'll be up in a day or two! In the mean time, we're literally 1/4 of the way through, which is very exciting for me! I hope you're enjoying these kids, and that you'll enjoy (in a different, sadder way) what comes next, as the Plan takes shape every time I hammer out another intro._

_One thing to be aware of; this is a stage where plot decisions are being made, and your feedback interests me to that end! If you like something or someone (or don't), I hope you'll let me know, because if I don't know, I won't... know. :)_


	9. Don't Tell Me The Odds (or, District 5)

Don't Tell Me The Odds (or, District 5)

x

i can't stop bruising my knees  
over what i can't have

in the absence of want  
i am a colony of bees  
with a dead queen

'Space Ratio', Cassandra De Alba

x

Kiran Patel, District 5

I painted the ceiling of my room light blue a few years ago, with Lumen's help. Had her over for a full weekend, basically, just messing around and getting utterly covered with paint for step one, the canvas. For the next part, the really fun part, we went in with some white paint, bits of yellow leftover from surrounding the light in the center of my bedroom with a halo of sunshine. So when I lay in bed and look up, it's like looking past the ceiling, into the clouds.

Not that I stay in here too much if I can avoid it, but I've always liked it, trying to divine meaning from something totally random. Things people have already totally figured out just aren't interesting. I don't think that's insane of me to think, right? Who wants to burn their whole life just doing the sort of thing a machine could do just as easily, if we've already got a line of code or twenty that'd just as easily solve the problem?

I still sleep here, like, for now, so I wake up and see the clouds I painted in more tolerable times, and the light streaming in from my second-floor window makes it clear that it's morning. Like, deep morning. And maybe it's finally finished raining.

The sun didn't interrupt my sleeping, though. That'd be my parents yelling at each other just downstairs. You can say a lot of things for District 5, honestly, but not much for the thickness of the walls of most of our houses. At some point, someone realized it was more trouble than it's worth trying to tornado-proof shit, I think, so here we are. Quick, cheap, and easy.

Ideally, I could roll over and go back to sleep, but the volume with which my dad is currently shouting - about me, delightfully enough - is making that a difficult prospect.

"You can't coddle him like this, Darya," he's insisting - clear enough who 'him' is, since I'm the only son, and Koyna and Kabini, my sisters, though barely out of daycare, are already showing the signs of overachieving in a way that my parents find quite amenable.

Really, it'd be obnoxious if the twins weren't so cute. And with the population expansion initiatives in effect, though my parents definitely can't take the hit to their pride necessary to admit it, their presence in our house is worth a small fortune in tax incentives.

Can't say I don't pay attention to things.

Though, evidently enough from the content of most of our disagreements, my dad would strongly prefer it if I turned my capacity to pay attention more constructively to schooling and finding a job for once graduation rolls up, rather than messing around with Lumen and watching reruns of the Games and current-runs of the increasingly fascinating lineup of shows about life in other districts, woundcare... hell, even fashion and shit.

All of it a lot more interesting than anything District 5 has to offer.

Last time we talked I got an earful for suggesting that if I ended up forced into hydroelectric operations, as seems to be his latest plan for me, I'd swan dive off a dam rather than spend a full year staring at spreadsheets like some kind of automaton.

He took that kind of personally, given that his job is essentially staring at spreadsheets like some kind of automaton, and it's a rough enough job, out there, that a few of his coworkers actually have kicked it in that sort of approach.

I want to be sympathetic, but my dad and I have kind of reached a stalemate lately in 'capacity to extend sympathy to each other', and I'm really not interested in being the one who cracks first.

"This won't work if we aren't in agreement!" he says adamantly, words echoing up the stairs as I try not to roll my eyes.

"Well, _I'm _not in agreement!" my mom shoots back. "He's still having a hard time after…"

"_Five years ago_, Darya! Half a decade! How long are you going to let him play you like a fiddle?"

Yeah, that's my cue to head out.

They're both sort of right, in the sense that my little sister Karha, ten at the time, did die five years ago, when some kind of fever sprung up in our area, and I _don't _like to think about that, yeah. But also, it's pretty much the best pretense to duck out of sweeping the kitchen, since it still gets to my mom a bit and it's not a total lie.

But it's not, like, my whole deal. I have a lot of other deals. Potentially. I just have to figure out, more concretely, what they are.

That's not going to happen in bed, so I roll out, make a halfhearted effort to toss my covers into place, and get dressed quickly. Our house is tucked up against a bluff, so I don't have to shimmy or jump or otherwise make a fool of myself making my escape through my bedroom window.

It's been my main entrance and exit to the house since my dad got the bright idea of imposing some kind of 'job search quota' after my eighteenth birthday a few weeks back. My footfalls are starting to permanently discolor the thick grass of the bluff with the amount of time I spend coming and going by this route.

The unseasonable rains that have been sweeping through Five, at least, obfuscate my typical path over the bluff, since, with just a little variation, it's easy to avoid leaving behind a trail of downtrodden vegetation. Even though I pretty much only go to one place.

Ten minutes' walk, pleasant in the early-afternoon sunlight of the cool and slightly windy Saturday, has me outside of Lumen's house.

She might as well be, like, my cousin, for all we look nothing alike. Literally, since her mom and my dad have been close friends for basically forever, moving from school to work on the dams and up into management in the same cohort, which is what passes for found family in District 5.

Unfortunately, because of that same oddly close relationship that brought us into each others' lives in the first place, I can't go in the front door, here, either, since her mom will likely as not drag me home by my ear for my dad to deal with, and I've learned quickly enough how to avoid that.

Instead of making any critical error I may have succumbed to in the past, I tap on Lumen's window, knowing she'll likely be around, pretending to study or reading or watching something on her mini-screen or whatever it is she's been up to since I last saw her on Wednesday, after school. We have a semi-weekly rock throwing contest established in the aftermath of our old tradition of getting together to watch the Games and shoot the shit.

"Hey!" In a second, her halo of fluffy brown hair is visible through her window, brown eyes bright with anticipation. "Thought you weren't coming! C'mon in."

"Aw, you missed me?" I half-whisper.

Her television isn't on, so I do sort of have to be quiet.

"Not on your life. Just figured you'd drowned and wasn't looking forward to dredging the river for your skinny ass. You'd slip through the net and it'd take months."

"Ouch! Right out of the gate," I say, feigning woundedness, an effect probably diminished by my grinning as I clutch my hands to my heart.

"Yeah, been sitting on that one for a while," she says, helping me through the window.

"Sweet how you have to work so hard to keep up," I tell her, landing on my feet as I roll into her room.

No painting on this ceiling. Lumen is no interior decorator, literal piles of stuff strewn on every available surface. I may not be very helpful around the house, but I'm interested in keeping my space habitable. It's borderline charming, borderline disturbing how she's never really seemed to give much of a damn.

"It's not easy dunking on you so hard literally all the time," she retorts. "I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a labor, though it's a labor of love."

I shift a stack of papers, two potted plants, and an empty water bottle off one of her chairs, and decide to let her have that one. Since I do love Lumen. How could I not love the only other person in this ridiculous sector of this ridiculous district with anything interesting to say, who's consistently willing to say it?

"You got anything going on today?" I say.

"Eh," she says. "Not feeling so hot."

She gestures vaguely at the room around her.

"Sorry, the train wreck of my living space matches the train wreck in my brain."

I try very hard not to frown at this. Lumen and I have our struggles, but it's rare that we're having particularly rough moments in synchroneity. I was actually really hoping she'd be outrageously-buoyant-Lumen, an iteration of herself so cheerful that it's impossible not to drop some of my self-important bullshit in her presence.

Something about the set of her shoulders and her expression, even discounting what she's saying, though, is conveying… well, defeat.

"Why don't we head out?" I say. "It's a really beautiful day, finally."

"Finally is right," she agrees, cracking a smile. "I think all the rain and whatever has been getting to me. Feels like forever since I saw the sun."

Weird as it is for me to be the one encouraging _her_ to go out and do something, I help her back through the window and partially close it behind me. An almost palpable sense of relief accompanies the realization that she's pretty much supporting her own weight, doing her own thing, physically capable if not in a great brain-space.

It's really shaping up to be a lovely afternoon. The perfect kind of day for doing absolutely nothing, not getting in anyone's way, but also just… existing. While the weather was clear on my way over, the wind is beginning to whisk piles of fluffy clouds into the vault of sky. A sign of more rain, unfortunately.

The bad weather lately has actually been a problem in the district, and I've been kind of following it. We rely so much on the river, which everyone acknowledges is difficult to predict, even with people at the top of every graduating class getting funneled into teams working on modeling every conceivable interaction between the world and our hydroelectric stations. Tessera grain and oil has apparently been forfeit to the unseasonable flooding and, if you ask me, shoddy architecture, probably. Things are tighter than usual, and the newspapers reflect it.

See, I say shit like that to my dad, and he loses his mind, acting like there's something wrong with me because I can track the news but not, depending on the day, _my grades_ or _a job_.

Neither of those are particularly interesting, though. Any idiot can do the work and turn in the assignments and get treated like a genius for doing what they're told. Half of what he's trying to get me into amounts, more or less, to self-limiting paths that would actually _prevent _me from thinking about things that are actually relevant and important. Hence my 'I'll jump off a bridge, don't push me' threats, which are utterly sincere.

We find a nice spot on the bluffs, high ground so the sun has had time to dry it out and we're not resting our heads in literal mud.

"I think the world might be going to hell," I say, settling into the grass, canting my head up so I can watch as the wind sweeps clouds in and out of my field of vision.

If I were going to do something - really, if there was a chance in hell at it - I'd want to apply for an inter-sector transfer, get into modelling if I could. I like to think I have sort of a knack for it. The problem, as I've told Lumen and basically no one else, is that I've dicked around so much in school for the last few years that I don't really have the means to get there.

None of my teachers like me enough to vouch for me, which is perfectly valid of them, since I can be kind of a deadpan asshole in class, and my grades are… fine, really. As good as anyone doing the literal bare minimum could hope to do. Better, really, because I'm not stupid, just took a long time to figure out what I even might care about, finding patterns and sense in an immeasurably complicated world rather than just adhering to someone else's imagined rules, and by then it was too late.

I'm eighteen. My parents won't let me forget that. And it feels like, no matter how hard my dad is angling to shoehorn me into some miserable life path, the one who's fucked up my chances of being something worth being is me.

Though I don't especially want to get into that, now or ever.

It is what it is.

"How come the world's fucked?" Lumen asks. "Anything _specifically_ fucked, I mean, or just a general observation? 'Cause I've been kinda feeling that way too, lately."

I sigh.

"We're like… rats in a cage, here."

"Nice analogy."

"Thanks, thought of it myself."

"That's nothing new, though," Lumen complains. "C'mon, if you didn't have that shit figured out around the same time you learned to like, _spell _'dictatorship'..."

Even when she's down herself, Lumen's always had a remarkable way of making me laugh.

"I'll give you that," I agree.

"You been following the new Games thing?"

"Not really," I say.

About three weeks ago, they made a huge announcement. Lumen's family came over to my family's place to watch it all together, figure out what was going to happen, whether the finale was really finale, how bad things were actually going to be. I mean, if you ask my parents, it's all just some kind of horror show that they can't stand to watch.

Maybe I get it, Karha being dead and all. More dead kids. It's sad, of course. But it's also on the screen, not in front of you, and it's like… what are you going to do, just ignore some fact of the world, hide your head in the sand and refuse to face the way things work, even if it's not exactly the way you want it?

"I've been getting kind of into it, but I think it's bumming me out," she says, rolling over on her side to frown at me. "There's no updates on anyone from Five putting themselves in the running, yet."

"There's a running?"

"Yeah, the mayor's office has made some announcements. Incentives and stuff. They're trying to seal the deal fast, get this over with. It's just a big distraction from actually doing shit, y'know? I think I feel that. I keep having dreams about volunteering and waking up, like, terrified."

"...why would you be terrified?" I ask, curious, now, meeting her eyes.

"Dude, I can fuck around and joke, but I don't want to die. What, you got something to tell me?" she watches me appraisingly, pausing to take in my non-expression in response. When she next speaks, her tone is more obviously concerned. "Kiran…"

"Been thinking about it, but you don't have to worry about me," I reassure her.

"_Kiran_."

"Swear to god, not gonna hurl myself into a river any time soon," I insist, actually putting my hand up as though I'm making an oath. "Why are you watching the coverage if it makes you so miserable?"

"I…" She shrugs into the grass, looking back up at the sky. "There's some interesting stuff. Your favorite _not-victor _made it onscreen the other day."

"What, not another replayed interview?" I complain.

The last victor I accurately called, in what used to be an annual tradition with me and Lumen, was Sharon. Now, lots of people like to act like she was obviously the one lined up, and sure, in _retrospect_, but I actually felt pretty clever pulling that together from the clues they dropped. And I really thought I was going to be right the next year, the 88th, finding some of the same patterns in the way they portrayed Star from District 1, but well… that didn't go super well for her or for me.

We'd had a bet going, like usual, me and Lumen, and I'd had to jump naked into the river at sunrise as part of losing. She's not so much into picking specific people as I am; I said 'it'll be Star' and she said 'you're full of shit'. Her statement turned out to be right-er than mine, so I bit the bullet and jumped, because a bet is a bet.

It's not so much that I looked dumb as that I'm almost completely sure there was some funny business going on, the same as in the 89th, when I was ready to stake my fucking life on it being Manari - it was all there, every single lead-up, and then… well.

Here's the thing. He did technically live, though he's been on television like three times since then, once on Intensive Care talking about being a paraplegic, about as haughty as a person can be while describing their own paralysis, the absolute legend, and twice, weirdly enough, on shows that do commentary and lead-up to Presidential announcements, both times on TGN. Not to mention, when all the crazy shit came out about Head Gamemaker Neves and Lorca and whoever the fuck else colluding on all sorts of fucked up bullshit, one of the subtler pieces of news to come from it was that Manari had been tapped from the beginning to win.

I can't call his case a loss, which is a good thing, since the stakes I set were wildly high, originating from such ridiculous overconfidence that like, in hindsight, even I want to punch some sense into me.

The loser volunteers.

It was an easy bet, since we both kind of knew going into it that it was a deliberately melodramatic move on my part, trying to make up for being so catastrophically wrong the previous year. Not just winning big, but winning big enough to get back at Lumen for the way she made fun of me for, she claimed, 'mooning over Star', which was not even remotely what was happening. So I could make fun of her for not going through with an un-go-throughable bet.

Even that wasn't the best remedial action, though, because she just spent the majority of the 89th accusing me of mooning over_ Manari_, which I absolutely, adamantly wasn't doing. I just thought he was cool and clearly a better choice than the person who won, like, y'know, the one who couldn't string two sane-sounding sentences together, though it's been easier not to get annoyed with Cora now that she occasionally seems coherent on Intensive Care.

"No, he was in District Seven for some reason," Lumen says. "Talking about how stupid anyone volunteering would have to be, basically. I think they're involving him in some way and he seemed exasperated about it."

I look back at her, raising my eyebrows, like, tell me more.

"Yeah, knew _that _news was gonna get you all hot and bothered," she laughs.

"Fuck off," I say, reaching over to give her a push to the shoulder as she refuses to stop giggling. "You seem fine. Why were we talking about your issues? Mine are clearly more important if you can spare so much time chortling over your own… frankly, _homophobic _speculations."

"How the fuck is that… you know what? Fine, I'll bite, what's your damage this weekend?"

The cloud cover is getting denser overhead, the fluffy white clouds giving way to towering thunderheads blown in from the west. While there's no sunlight to get in my eyes, I find myself frowning up at the greying sky.

"I don't know."

"Of course you know, idiot, you spend eighty percent of your miserable life holed up inside your own head, acting like you understand everyone else's bullshit in between bouts of over-analyzing your own."

My frown deepens slightly.

"I don't think that's fair."

"Isn't it?" she prompts. "Prove me wrong, then, and externalize some shit for once instead of bottling it up."

"Do you ever feel like it's too late to do anything that matters?"

"Uh, only all the time," she says, though it comes out a little more subdued than her usual witty jabs. "Welcome to being eighteen."

"I think I want to…"

I can't easily bring myself to end the sentence, already knowing exactly what she's going to say. Lumen is smart, better company than most people, more understanding, in part because she, herself, is so weird. That's always been our point of connection. It's also kept us from connecting with anyone else, pretty much. Which is why our friendship is so solid, but also why… if I say this, it'll hurt her.

And I'm not sure yet.

"...do something. Something better," I say, more or less copping out of having this conversation with her.

"Like, bring your grades up?" she asks, poking me in the side. "You know you could, if you gave a shit."

"Not exactly," I say.

The first of a slow series of rain drops splashes into my face as thunder rumbles overhead. I'm not going to make this decision rashly, I don't think.

But, whether or not she'll be horrified to learn her part in it, Lumen has reminded me that there's more than one path I can take. I've been feeling trapped by the vision of my dad's office, the same clothes, the same moronic pencil-pushing every fucking day for the rest of my life. That's a fate worse than death, there. I know that much is true.

"Hey," I tell her. "I'm gonna head home before the sky opens up. My dad's been spoiling for a fight for a while. Things are just going to be unpleasant until I deal with that head-on."

"Don't do anything stupid," she warns me.

"What, me, stupid?"

"Yeah, in my experience."

"You wound me, Lumen. My pride is _wounded_."

"Seems like it worked, though, whatever I just said, huh?" she laughs. "Good for you. Take a little initiative. Can't hurt, can it? I'll stop watching depressing shit if you deal with… whatever's got you in a weird place, okay?"

"Okay," I agree, reaching out my hand to shake on it, the same way we always do for our bets.

It begins to rain in earnest as I give her a hug goodbye and head home. I'm drenched, my hair wrecked, as I approach my own front door for the first time in a long time, hearing my father's raised voice again. It's as though I never left.

The present seems as miserable as, in reality, it is.

But the future, for the first time in a good long while, glimmers with the possibility of something… interesting.

x

Styx, District 5

The river running past, like twenty feet from the place we're sheltering beneath the overpass, is swollen and brown from how hard it's been raining lately, including the fresh cloudburst that started like an hour ago. Loud enough to keep our voices from filtering to any surveillance equipment, though I bet there's not much out here. I did a runthrough while I was planning the move, looking for any cameras. None, though that doesn't rule out other recording stuff.

You gotta be careful.

It's a good way to get fucking nailed by Peacekeepers, bragging too loud somewhere about whatever shit you've been up to. A few of them are already on my case, not least of them that motherfucker Aldon, and in this case, I actually _am _up to kinda shady shit, since that's all I'd ever get up to with Kiff. He's leaning his whole weight against the lichen-studded cement strut that supports the train tracks running overhead, breathing heavily. A skinny little fucker, probably fifteenish, though I can't be fucked to ask, he could basically be my brother, same tanned skin and dark hair and hollow sort of look.

Basically the only guy I'm willingly tolerating at the moment, and that's partially because of the massive crate we've just successfully lifted out of some kind of public warehouse after a full week of planning, from putting together a palet that could be dragged across the softened riverside earth to scoping out the place, making sure there was actually a shipment… it definitely says 'Tesserae' stamped a bunch of times across it, and it only had time to rest near the exit that we taped open for like a day before we managed to make off with it.

Not that I'd say any of that shit out loud, even with the river to drown it out.

I've gotten burned by my own big mouth too many times to fuck myself over. Seventeen, maybe, or whatever I am, is too old to be making idiot mistakes.

Once I've caught my breath, well before Kiff, I take my backpack from my shoulder and take out a pry bar to get the lid off the thing. He pauses, straightening out, to watch me work.

It's supposed to be oil. There's no way it's just grain, since it was so fucking heavy - that's good, because you can get more fencing Tessera oil than grain, for the most part. At least, that's what Jules said the last time I swung by her outfit, looking for tips on what could get a good price these days after my job at the bakery didn't pan out.

Nice way of putting it, huh? It wasn't too bad, working with the nice baker lady or whatever her name was, but I didn't do too well with customers, for the most part, and even though she was down to give me another chance, the thing is, the difference between _one _asshole with a bloody lip or _two_ makes no fucking difference to me.

But it did for her, so now shit's gonna get thin real fast if I don't figure out a racket. Fuck me for trying to go legit, for like… the eighth time or so.

Figuring out some way to keep myself fed has never been a serious problem before, and it's not now. The crate creaks as I leverage it open with the steel tool.

...no oil inside.

Just… some stuff I don't even know on sight.

"Well that's… stupid," I say, staring at the contents without really understanding what the fuck I'm looking at. "Where's the oil? Dude, you said there was oil. Confirmation was your job. Who told you there was fucking oil in that warehouse?"

Kiff looks about as confused as I'm feeling right now, which is inexplicably frustrating, like, come _on_, dude, _you_ fucking told me, what the fuck? But at the same time, I'm not, like, mad. Because it's not like the whole thing went to shit or anything, just… it's just a heavy crate filled with a bunch of dumb tech stuff that neither of us know how to resell, so what's the point?

He flits in to look at the mess of wires and metal boxes and shrugs.

"Look, I heard from Charles that they were storing Tessera shit, okay?" he says, defensiveness rising in his tone. "Dunno if something got switched around, or…"

He stops talking when I take one of the weird box-with-nubs-and-wires-and-shit things out of the box and chuck it at his head. It's heavier than I thought, and if he wasn't a spindly shit with near-superhuman ability to avoid hurled objects, it might have left behind a real dent. Instead, the metal box smashes into the concrete of the overpass with a sort of crunching noise behind where his head used to be.

Wisely, he doesn't say a word, just stands back up, crosses his arms, and waits for instructions.

"We gotta dump it," I say with a shrug. "All of it."

"But -"

It's not like Kiff to fuck around so much. Usually he knows the deal. Maybe it's just the fuckedness of the afternoon not going the way he thought it would. Maybe… maybe he feels guilty because he's got some shit to do with the switch from abundantly-resellable cooking oil to not-remotely-resellable wire-y box-looking things.

Wouldn't really put it past the mousy fucker. Gonna have to deal with that later, I guess.

Lucky, again, he shuts up as I reach for another box.

"We gotta," I insist. "Could be tracking shit or something in it."

I'm already in a mess for the last dick of a customer whose face I slammed down on a countertop, like, right before I got canned, so this is actually kind of fucking high stakes for me. Not like Kiff's got enough brains to figure that out from my tone.

He whines like a kicked dog.

"Styx, c'mon, we spent so much time getting this one stupid crate, can't we just try Baxter or Jules or something and see if either of them'll give us anything for it?"

"I'll fucking kill Baxter," I say, more thanks to word recognition than any particular impulse at the moment. The bastard likes to think he knows shit better than I do because he's still in school, like that makes him any less of a piece of trash the Peacekeepers'd love to sweep up and be done with us for good.

"So we can hit Jules, then…"

"Seriously, Kiff, don't fuck with me right now. I'm being straight. We're dumping this bullshit."

My long-suffering friend-_ish_ is back to looking like he'd like to whine, but might have managed to scrounge up an ounce of dignity, so he'll have to settle for a sort of frustrated sigh. At least when I reach for my handle of the crate, he obediently picks up the lid, muscles it back into place, and grabs the opposite handle.

Good boy.

It bugs him when I say that out loud, but honestly, that's the only way Kiff and me are ever gonna get along. I know what I'm about, and if someone's not ready to be about the same thing as me, there's nothing I can do with an extra pair of hands that I couldn't do with one and a little time to think it over.

Baxter and everyone else can take their heads out of their asses, I'm not _stupid_. I did pretty decent in school until the administration got all serious about some shit and… well. I don't do great with people telling me what to do, which is basically a sign of being smart, actually, since the only other smart people I know also manage their own shit and don't take it from anyone.

"Where to?" he asks, and I'd nod approvingly if the crate wasn't so fucking heavy, him barely carrying his end, reedy fucker.

"River," I say, the two syllables rolling out as one, in a sort of a huff, all of my strength in getting the box back onto the palet that lets us move the fucking thing.

After a few seconds of intense concentration, we get the dumb thing up. Just a few steps and the effort of actually getting the shit out of it, now. Good riddance. My stomach is growling, and if there's no oil to fence, I'm just gonna have to risk hitting the approved tourist area, maybe clean myself up a bit first, since I probably look like I just crawled out of the river, and have a go at conning some Capitol idiots out of their leftovers.

Which is just about my least favorite thing to do, scrounging around to fill my stomach like I'm too stupid to do anything else, and I'm not, seriously, but like… hungry is hungry, one of the few things I can't keep a handle on without… dealing with it in other ways.

Now that it's loaded, I take the improvised pull-device we added to the palet, according to plans Jules drew up a while back. To give her credit, her design works damn well. Though of course, Jules is one of those few street-adjacent fuckers who actually finished her schooling, and did some kind of fancy design competitions too, though from a house where her mom beat the shit out of her, if she's to be believed. And now she's one of us, ish.

I guess I believe her. Cagey enough for such a smart motherfucker. Gotta explain that somehow.

"C'mon," I say, gesturing to the palet-bound crate, pretty much stuck there with its own weight. "You push, I'll pull."

"Fine," Kiff pants, looking green at the thought of doing more work, though he complies.

Inch by inch, we get the palet moving over the sodden ground. It's rougher this time, since we planned our escape from the factory, making off with the crate of stolen shit, downhill. Like, on purpose. And this is the opposite of that, though it's sure further than either of us would've been able to move something this heavy half a fucking inch without it.

"How come it says _Tessarae_ if it's not oil," Kiff complains aloud as we pause to breathe. "That's what that says, right?"

Too winded to speak, I nod, frowning bitterly at what might have been. It really was such a fucking fakeout. Since when has Kiff known how to read, also? Not like either of us talk about where we come from much, but we overlapped in the community home for a while back when we were too young to figure our shit out on our own. He was even better at getting out of going to school than I was.

There were things I liked about it, after all. Always food and shit, and I had a few decent teachers who were dumb enough, I guess, to think that if I put more effort into it, I could be something.

Well, I am something.

I'm a rain-soaked asshole in a dingy leather jacket dragging a pallet of stolen goods to a riverbank, but that's s_omething_. I've given up trying to make myself feel bad about fucking shit up. What's done is in the past, and what matters is the shit I'm lugging along right now and nothing else.

Especially once the crate starts beeping.

Like, beeping is kinda putting it mildly. An alarm goes off. Light is flashing from the base of the thing, a high-pitched peal of pure sound ripping out of the stupid box.

Kiff immediately lets go of the crate, and I stop being able to make progress, which, like, probably would have been the case anyway, because the beeping is so loud that I have this visceral impulse to drop everything and freeze and cover my ears until it passes, which is… dumb as hell, and as soon as I realize that it's not my choice, that the sound is freaking me out on some animal level, I put a stop to it.

"Motherfucker!" I snarl, as Kiff starts to edge away. "What the fuck did I say was gonna happen?"

We're still about ten feet from the dropoff to the roiling river, but I tear the lid off the crate and start chucking the boxes, one by one, checking each to see which is making the fucking noise. Halfway in, I find the box that's the culprit, which looks like all the others, apart from the flashing and alarm sounds.

Once that one splashes into the river, after a second of garbled noise, the only disturbances are once again thee rain and the river.

"Hey, Kiff," I add. "If you set this up, I'll fucking kill you, and that's a promise."

He shakes his head nervously, still looking disoriented.

"We should run, Styx."

"No!" I insist. "Whatever the fuck these things are… fuck them! Fuck whoever… fuck!"

I can't quite articulate my feelings, the rising and utterly irrational rage rising in my chest like the magma under the top layer of the earth that feeds the stupid geothermal plants, threatening to burst out in a shower of fire. No, it doesn't make sense, but… fuck this fuck this _fuck this_!

The crate has been lightened a bit in the process of my tossing out half its contents, and now I can drag it myself, and I do. A few more feet, then back to picking up the weird tech things, though tossing them into the river doesn't seem like enough anymore.

I take to smashing them on the rocky bank, then chucking the rest.

The roar of the river fills my ears.

Who the fuck would do that? Just put a bunch of useless shit in a box that's supposed to be useful shit and then put a fucking alarm in it and fuck _me _over _on purpose_, it's just so fucking _fucked_.

This isn't anything new.

It's the same shit that makes it impossible to work like a normal person in a normal job, even when I actually want to. You know what? Fuck the baker lady, too, and fuck everyone who's ever bought bread with money they earned, and fuck Kiff for his stupid fucking 'tip' about Tessera oil, and - and - and…

"Styx," Kiff calls urgently, and I swivel to face him, fully prepared to… I don't know. Beat him to death with one of the boxes left in the crate, I wouldn't fucking put it past myself.

"The fuck do you want?"

"We need to _go_…"

And then, from the precipice of the riverbank, he seems to disappear behind a bluff.

The anger in my chest goes white hot, scary-calm, like I know exactly what to do. Seizing the crate, much lighter now, I bolt the rest of the distance to the riverside. No more time to throw shit, I guess.

"Stop!" someone calls, and I see a distinct flash of white armor.

_Fuck off_, I think, dumping the rest of the shit into the tumultuous water, tossing the crate aside when I'm done and turning around triumphantly to flip off whoever the fuck thinks they can tell me what to do with both hands.

A bullet rips through my left shoulder, knocking me bodily to the ground, spraying blood over the rocks and shards of metal from my smashing up the boxes, some of which stab into the meat of my arm as I make impact.

My vision goes hazy.

It's like the blazing heat inside my chest fades as every beat of my fucking heart spills more blood out.

"Kiff!" I shout. "Kill them! Fucking kill them!"

As though he could do anything of the sort. Pliant little motherfucker's probably already got his tail between his legs, ready to whine his way out of the worst of the trouble. I may be a piece of shit, but I don't take shit lying down, don't take disrespect, not for a fucking second.

The shock is beginning to fade, and I can actually feel my arm, which is truly fucked, but I make a real go at standing, until a white armored boot pushes me back into the mud.

"Of course it's you," Peacekeeper Aldon says, and though my vision is too jacked to make out his expression, I can imagine his lip curling.

While I can't sit up, I have a real go at spitting on him, though I can't summon up much saliva, my mouth dry, shuddering from blood loss.

"Fuck… off…" I hiss, then try to bite his boot.

He kicks me in the teeth.

I think I feel one come loose, to the side. Asshole, motherfucker, piece of shit.

"I'll fucking _kill you_," I try to say, though through the ensuing mouthful of blood and with my head spinning from the kick, it comes out in a sort of garbled mess.

"Where you're going, I doubt you'll have a chance," he says, and I feel an armored fist close around the scruff of my neck, lifting me to my feet. "You've become a real nuisance, you know that? And wanted, now, for assault, violation of parole, theft of Tessera oil…"

"There wasn't any fucking oil!" I spit, easier now that I'm basically dangling from my collar, not quite choking on blood anymore.

He clucks his tongue.

"You certainly destroyed anything that would have proved that. _Millions of credits_ worth of proof of that."

The collection of people waiting up on the bluffs as he drags me bodily back up, wriggling and hissing and spitting out blood all the way, sort of disturbingly don't all appear to be Peacekeepers. Not my first clue that something fucked is going on, but the first I've really consciously acknowledged.

"Wh… who… the fuck," I demand, fumbling the words, fading in and out of awareness.

"Bring her in. She destroyed all of it. Book it as Tessera theft," Aldon instructs a pair of helmeted Peacekeepers, who I'd probably recognize if I could see their faces.

"I'll kill you," I insist weakly.

"Call the mayor. Let her know we've got a candidate who's just _desperate_ to kill people. Maybe bring in a medic, too. That arm look like a lost cause to you?"

He turns back to a pair of suit-wearing men, like, nice suits. People I don't recognize. Business-y looking fuckers. One of them eyeing me up and down, the other ignoring me to talk to Peacekeeper Aldon.

"Fucking… kill you," I repeat.

"No, you won't," he laughs, already absorbed in some kind of conversation about shipments and loss recovery or some shit with one of the guys.

I spit out a last mouthful of blood, manage to get some on the shoes of the guy who won't stop fucking looking at me as the two Peacekeepers drag me away, one maintaining an iron grip at the arm that's still fucking spewing blood.

"Get _fucked_," I declare, and then I pass out, without really processing that this time, at least, _I'm _kinda the one who's fucked, here.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol

A few outliers in the later districts had handed her volunteers within the first few weeks. District 5 was the last of this cohort. Two months after her first visit to establish, with Mayor Bastos, the incentives they would be offering to volunteers, which included a family stipend, an immediate paycheck, and re-entry into the district's housing lottery, including an option to transfer sectors, if any next of kin requested the rights.

That seemed reasonable to her. Mayor Bastos was a pleasant, late-middle-aged, extensively greyed woman, who she knew from her files had a background in photovoltaic cell design, and had taken up politics in the aftermath of the Mockingjay Rebellion. District 5 was, perhaps as a result, governed with the sort of near-ruthless, impersonal efficiency that one might expect of an engineer.

Her overwhelming impression was that District 5's government wanted little more than for the whole business of the Games to be forgotten. She found that relatable, though she couldn't say for sure that she'd arrived at the conclusion with the same motivations.

Both of their selected applicants were eighteen, relatively normal looking. One a seemingly well-adjusted young man with average grades, from the hydroelectric sector, solidly middle class - of course, how well-adjusted could a volunteer really be? The other, an ex-community-home fugitive who insisted on being referred to mononymously as 'Styx', and was otherwise uncooperative in supplying background information. It didn't matter much; she'd signed the necessary paperwork, in chickenscratch, yes, but it was complete, and Herodotus would take care of the rest of things.

This, at least, she could safely pass off to her cousin: the matter of unraveling these children's stories in advance of the Games. He was an incredibly reliable researcher, and even if they'd had no relation at all, she felt that she'd have been impressed enough by his storywork on extra-Games coverage at TGN to get to know him. With a little luck, the process would be revealing enough to assuage some of his worries about the sheer scale of the challenge of the Games.

At this point, they'd received and accepted nominations from the trainee districts, of course, as well as District 3, District 5, District 9, and, predictably, District 11, which had actually filed paperwork before _District 4_, to almost no one's surprise.

She worked fast, but when it came to Eleven's honor, Cereus and Sharon worked faster. It didn't quite feel right to separate them from their district of origin, but their talents were certainly needed elsewhere with the strength of their volunteers, and Sequin seemed to be relieved by the prospect of an easy task that would nonetheless afford her the chance to have a real hand in the progression of the Games.

A lot of it was working out.

Reexamining the pictures of the two volunteers from Five, she grimaced internally, knowing that she wasn't exactly handing them off into Sharon or Cereus' capable hands.

They'd be mentored by Corsage.

She had no idea, really, how that was going to go. The alternative was Finish, who, having _produced _Corsage, she felt debatably had the potential to be just as bad. And it just made more sense. Surely there were some limitations to her perspective, but it felt like the only option. A very neutral district. Mayor Bastos wouldn't make a fuss.

And Niagara was too dead to care much about anything.

Perhaps District 5 had already learned all of the necessary lessons about winning the Games and what that was worth in the grand scheme of things.

Logistically, yes, she had a handle on this. She could prepare at every interval for the worst potentialities of Corsage's behavior, extend that attentiveness to the other mentors, put Hero in charge of drafting, initially, background projections of the victors in her care. He'd done good work with that. Caught some things that she didn't quite see herself, but made sense in context. They were as prepared as two people essentially co-acting as Head Gamemaker could be, practically speaking.

Morally speaking…

Styx's dark eyes met hers unhesitantly from the holographic projection of her tablet. It would be _her_ or it would be _someone else_, she knew. Flicked through. Kiran's expression was inscrutable, unknowable. Why did he do it?

Hero would know soon enough.

There were no red flags, regardless. The concerns being that rebels or particularly ardent supporters of Capitolist supremacy might deliberately make their way into the Games with the intention to upset the finale in some way that would bring the whole thing off the rails. The Games could accommodate chaos; they always did. Her vision for the Games was to elevate the chaotic element of the people involved. The only element from within the arena that might actively be set at odds with their objectives, it seemed, was someone with a concrete goal other than winning prior to entering the arena.

They'd just have to be careful about that.

She put her head in her hands, which she'd been doing a lot lately, and breathed. Closed down her tablet, poured a cup of tea from a cooling kettle on her stove, and considered going to sleep early. The skyline, from out her window, was as dark as the Capitol ever was.

Sipping the lukewarm beverage, she shook her head brusquely and reopened the holopad, beginning to draft a message to Hero. If she really cared about preserving some kind of stainless morality, she wouldn't be doing this in the first place. She would just let things dissolve and go to shit on their own from a beach in District 4. Would probably alienate fewer friends that way, but they'd be dead in a few years if the Capitolists got their way in rolling back Lancaster's reforms, so it was a double-edged sword.

"Hey, Hero," she began. "We have two more."

At least there was no complicated moral debate on that much, though what it meant, the way she'd said it… that was a different story.

_Two more_.


	10. Morbid Curiosity (or, District 6)

Morbid Curiosity (Or, District 6)

x

I think, today,  
I could be  
corrupted. And beautiful.  
And sunshine. And grey.

'Tell Me How It Makes You Feel', Valerie Hsiung

x

Livy Tanaka, District 6

There's a fire somewhere in the district. Not nearby. In the part where we live, pretty much in the place just before where the really nice houses lapse into slums, almost all of the structures are cinderblock. They don't burn easily, and if one of them had managed to go up in flames, the emergency siren would be an unignorable scream rather than a barely audible noise floating in on the wind.

Someone's having a bad night, but far away from here.

I look up from my novel and frown out into the dimly lit street, orange with the light from sodium lamps and not much else. My dad probably won't be home for a long time. That's what the siren, when it's not nearby, has come to mean. The only people in my house, until he makes his way back, armor smoke-stained and smelling like charred things and rubble, will be me and my grandparents.

Rather than my thoughts, I try to focus on the sounds coming from downstairs, which are muffled by my door. Can't piece out what they're doing just from this. Getting back to my novel, though, is nearly impossible, because the streetlamps are so orange that my mind keeps going to… well, fire, to the siren still in effect somewhere not-quite-far-away-enough. I wonder when my dad will get home.

That's a selfish thing to think, I know. I'm working on it. Both of my parents have important jobs to do, real things, meaningful things, for the district and the country, and it's not my place to complain about it. I know that. No one ever said it was easy to have two parents in the armed forces at once, though at least my dad comes home at night, usually.

My mom's been in the Capitol for years, now. Three years, since things started moving away from the hiatus and towards a new Hunger Games. A lot of District 2-born Peacekeepers were called into different terms of service, ended up moved around.

The rest of us are just sort of stuck here, waiting to learn when she'll come home.

I really miss her. But I know, I know, _I know _that's stupid and childish and selfish and awful. She wouldn't say that, not in so many words, and my dad's too soft-hearted to really tell me what he knows is true, but my grandparents are very clear on what we owe the country. Everything. Including parents, children, our own lives.

Dad says that's just a District 2 thing, that my mom's loyalty is something that he loves about her, but it's not how all of us have to be.

Not like I'll ever say it to him - not like he's home for dinner often enough to have that conversation - but that's just _stupid_. How are you supposed to admire someone and love them and _not_ want to be like them, more than anything? Completely, in every way that matters?

Homework may be a lost cause. I catch myself reading the same sentence over and over again. Not like it'll be a big problem if I don't finish by tonight. I'm sort of ahead of the class on the book. It's about a pre-Panem world, where the people charged with protecting the weak wear armor made of metal rather than combat-grade plastic and questions of honor are settled with sword-fights instead of mostly ignored, as they are in District 6, where everyone's just supposed to put their heads down and forget about things when it's more convenient.

I like the book, which makes it even more frustrating that I'm physically too tense to read right now.

Giving up, I stand, stretch, do a set of tricep dips in my chair, and feel even worse, somehow. Have I been getting enough sleep?

Probably won't tonight, anyway. I won't be able to until my dad gets home. Both out of worry and out of a sweltering bath of unpleasant thoughts, wondering if my mom is safe, wherever she is, whether I would know if she wasn't. I mean, I definitely wouldn't.

Firefighting is one thing. The mystery of her assignment is another. What my dad's doing here is just part of the initiative to put a better face forward to the community, in addition to keeping the keep the half of the district still made of wood from burning down. Not all of the slums are crater-scarred cement, after all.

But we'll never talk about it. Not whatever he does tonight, not what my mom is doing, hundreds of miles away, even when she sometimes sends letters. It's never about what she's doing. Reminders that she misses us and loves us, affirmation that she feels her service is valuable and wishes us all the same sense of purpose.

I do wish I had a sense of purpose. So much.

Basically as much as I wish I had my mom back, but how stupid is _that_?

The house feels really empty and I don't like it. The emptiness is sometimes like a tangible thing, heavy and suffocating, especially in the darkness of nights like these, with the siren still wailing in the distance. A bad fire. Even if it's too far away to smell the smoke.

I close the novel, abandon my desk, and turn off the light in my room.

Downstairs, it turns out that my grandparents have been watching television in the living room, my grandmother sharpening a sword with a thin sheet of fine-grained sandpaper, her movements slightly irregular, a tremendous strain evident in her forearms as she fights to keep them still.

My grandmother has never quite figured out how to stop fighting, anything and everything, even after she and my grandfather left Two to move in with us. Before my mom got shipped out and effectively marooned them here. They can't get a visa back. It's a little sad, though I'd never say it. I thought she was about the coolest person alive when I first met her. Now, she spends most of her days just sharpening the collection of swords she'll never be able to use again, some kind of degenerative condition slowly eating away at her ability to walk, the steadiness of her hands and her temper.

"Done with your work for the night?" she asks, a little sharply, and I nod.

"Yeah, just reading ahead at this point," I say. "May I join you?"

"Of course, Livy," my grandfather says, smiling thinly but sincerely.

He's an enormous man with watery blue eyes and a thick head of very white hair. A former subcommander, who, while he's quiet about it, was part of the force that retook the Capitol twenty years ago, he's strict, but more consistent and steady than my grandmother. I settle onto the smaller section of the couch, tucking my knees under me and resting my weight on them. Not the most exciting evening in, but at least it's a distraction.

Onscreen, an episode of Intensive Care is wrapping up. I recognize it as a rerun; my grandmother probably doesn't realize that, and my grandfather, more likely than not, just doesn't care. It makes pleasant background noise, and there _is _something to it if you watch, usually.

In this one, a young man has gone mute after some kind of mining accident. From one of the last two seasons, which have been set in Two. Cora Davis is sitting next to his bed, losing track of the fact that, while he's been silenced by the accident, _she _can still speak, and is writing messages back and forth with him on a pad of paper.

"That's a strong boy," my grandmother announces, as he struggles upon realizing that because of whatever kind of nerve damage they've mentioned in the last cut-away to medical diagrams, he can't laugh at a joke, gritting his teeth rather than crying at the loss of the ability to make a noise of joy.

_Not stronger than a quarry roof_, I think, but I don't say it.

It'd be a petty thing to say, and I'm really working on outgrowing that kind of thing. And whether or not she's got the muscle control to swing it, it's a losing proposition to antagonize my grandmother when she's holding a sword.

We watch in unpleasant silence, and my thoughts float past the onscreen wrap-up. I don't think I can hear the siren anymore. So the worst of whatever's happening out there will be over.

"Here," my grandmother says, breaking the silence again. "Take it, Livy."

She gestures with the hilt of the sword, as though there was any confusion about what she meant. Onscreen, the credits roll, attributing the production of Intensive Care to a long list of people with Capitol and District 2-style names, not unlike my own.

"Here," she says again, thrusting the blade into my hands with her own, which are starting to spot with age, and tremble wildly now that she's no longer focusing on keeping them still.

"Oh," I observe, taking it carefully. "It's very light."

"It was a wedding gift," she explains.

"Yes," my grandfather cuts in. "Magnus Craig."

"Magnus… yes," she agrees, as I heft the blade, watching the way the light flickers off the glassy-polished surface. "It would have been Magnus. He knew a good sword, bless him."

"More for you than for me," he laughs. "Look, it's practically sized for little Livy."

I wish my mom could see me, holding a sword like this. Just the feel of my grandparents' gaze on me, on my grip and my posture, which I know is exactly right, exactly like she taught me before she left, if she could just _see me_...

"Not so little," my grandmother says, and I feel a flush of pride begin from my heart, spreading to my limbs, as I make a few cautious thrusts with the blade, showing off a bit, now.

Since my mom's been gone, I've had to be careful about this kind of thing. My dad hates it when my grandparents start handing me blades, always has, thinks there's something wrong about teaching a child this kind of stuff. He could deal with it when it was my mom. Something about them and him, though, makes too much friction to function.

So I can't show this kind of stuff to my friends, can hardly do it ever, just when he's not around.

I know it would make my mom proud, that just doing it is like a way of being more like her, even though she's so far away, called to service, because they want her so badly, they need her there…

With a start, I remember that it's been a long time since I heard the emergency siren in the background. That my dad will be home soon. The guilt at this, like I'm somehow running around behind his back, pulling a fast one on him by hanging out with my grandparents, is… immense.

I know he's been lonely too, without mom. And he doesn't even have his own grandparents to lean on, since no one from the slums where he comes from, really, has grandparents leftover from the Rebellion. Just me and him. He likes to say that. Me and him and the two old people from District 2 who don't even seem to like him very much.

Me and him, and no fighting with bladed weapons. No trying too hard to be like my mom.

"Thanks, grandmother," I say, offering her the sword again. The case sits beside her on the couch, taking up more of the furniture than I did. "It's beautiful, and it handles like a dream, but I can't…"

She clucks her tongue.

"Koichi should get his act together, a girl your age should -"

"No," I interrupt, though I wince a little as I do it. "My dad is doing his best, I… I get it."

"He's going to get you killed," she complains, though she doesn't specify exactly how suboptimal swordswomanship is supposed to do that.

My grandfather laughs, stands, stretches.

"Let's all take our supplements and medicines for the night, alright, dear? Koichi will be home eventually, he'll want Livy to be in bed."

As he's in the kitchen, the doorbell rings.

That's odd. From the clock, it's clear it's too late for visitors, well after ten at night. He frowns and goes to the door.

"The rudeness," my grandmother comments, but something seems badly wrong about the situation, and I do something that shocks even me, and shush her.

She looks stunned, glancing up from putting the sword away in the fancy box, and I hold my ground.

A flash of a white uniform, visible even from the couch.

I stand before she can say anything else.

"Grandfather?" I call.

The interruption doesn't stop whoever's at the door from speaking. Unmuffled by a helmet. Why would the Peacekeeper take their helmet off? I know protocol well, my dad talks about it sometimes, my mom used to let me wear hers…

"I'm sorry," one of them says.

I bolt for the door.

"Sorry about what?" I demand, not caring, for once, that these are people to treat with respect and deference. I know that, I still know that, but I can't, and I can't hide the shake to my voice, the idiotic, childish whine of it, even though I know I should, I'm fifteen, I shouldn't sound this _stupid_…

It's Peacekeeper Nakamura and Peacekeeper Santos, two women about my dad's age, one Six-born, one shipped in from Ten. I know them, but somehow, that doesn't calm me down, just makes it worse, especially as Peacekeeper Nakamura's face falls when she makes eye contact.

"What happened?"

"I'm… sorry, Livy," she says.

"Tell me!"

Disrespectful, terrible, I know, I know, I can feel my grandfather making a reproachful face as I step forward, into the night air.

Out here, I can smell the smoke on the wind, still. Must have been a terrible fire. Must have been terrible -

"No," I say, just as Peacekeeper Santos opens her mouth to explain. "No, he… where is he? Is he in the hospital? Can I see him?"

She closes her mouth. Looks at Peacekeeper Nakamura. Shakes her head.

"Livy," she says gently. "Ah, you might want to sit down."

"Don't look at me like that!" I insist. "I'm not going to sit, just tell me where he is, tell me what happened, _please_!"

Why isn't my grandfather frantic, too? Why are no one else's eyes blurring with tears? I know what happened already. I know exactly what happened. But I want to preserve this moment of denying it almost as much as I want them to admit it, to just say it, come out with it, tell me I'm alone, tell me he's not coming back, just like my mom isn't coming back, and I'm stuck here, like my grandparents, in a place I never really wanted to be, and he…

"I'm sorry," she says again. "Peacekeeper Tanaka… Livy, he died heroically. He saved lives. He was a hero until the end. We found him after… it was the community home, Livy."

I can't hear what she's saying over the rush of blood in my ears, just that she keeps saying my _name_ and I want her to stop.

"Come in, please," my grandfather says, opening the door wider to allow both Peacekeepers in. "We'll need to discuss -"

Without another second of hesitation, I run for my room, take the steps three at a time, slam the door behind me, lock it, consider pushing over my bookcase. And I fight back the tears. It's not something I usually do, weeping over something, even something like this, even the pressing loneliness of my mom, the fear that my grandmother's illness will take her, too, the feeling of not fitting, here... since I'm not a stupid baby anymore, I'm mature, I'm older than my mom was when she fought to retake the Capitol, older than my father was when his parents were killed, and I'm so soft and stupid, still, so stupid…

I fall asleep at my desk, my book damp from crying onto it, wishing to be anywhere but here.

Anywhere but District 6, where nothing means anything and nothing matters, really, nothing matters, here, my grandparents would leave if they could, my mom took the first train out she could get…

I dream of a way out.

x

Lorean Marchand, District 6

Noxious grey smoke rolls from a crack in the furnace, directly next to the mouth and I put my magazine down for a moment and consider the problem. Only half an hour into the last cremation of the night, and already something going wrong. How to fix this?

First off, though, what the hell happened in the first place? I lean in and inspect the damage, which isn't really as bad as the billowing smoke would suggest. Aimon dealt with the last three himself, including one that the family sent in a fancy but very heavy wood coffin. He's not really equipped to handle any of this on his own, and odds are that he clipped the side of the furnace and smashed away already-age-weakened mortar from the crumbling bricks.

He wouldn't have said anything. Definitely not to me. Aimon's cagey as hell with me these days, especially on the subject of the family business.

Can't blame the guy, really.

I end up tracking down a bag of dry mortar, working it up as best I can, and shellacking it over the gap in the bricks, judging the work 'good enough for the moment'. The room stops filling up with corpse smoke, and I go back to reading my magazine.

"What's that sme-" my mother interrupts, walking in, her apron stained with blood and silicon, her gloves still wet and read. "Ah, looks like you've got a handle on things."

"Just some nick in the furnace," I say. "Alvah should probably take a look at it later, but I patched it for now."

My older sister has the patience for this sort of task, painstakingly piecing brickwork back into position and ensuring an airtight seal, what the sanctity of the furnace demands. I think if it started leaking again, I might just lump some more on. Then, because that seems like a great idea while I still have wet mortar, I pick up the bowl afresh and start adding more. More is better, probably.

"Great," my mom says, turning her head and coughing into her unbloodied elbow. "When you're done, I've got another ready for you."

"Is Alvah not home yet?"

"Out on retrieval," she explains with a sigh. "There was a fire. All hands on deck. You missed the sirens?"

"Can't hear a thing over the furnace," I say.

"Well, take care you're not breathing too much of this stuff," she suggests. "I'll try to get Mrs. Kobayashi fit for display before we're flooded with burnt corpses. At least half the job'll already be done for you once they roll in and we sort out identification."

"Are we displaying her?"

"No, the household is," my mom says with a grimace.

That's a bummer. We typically receive a stack of the decedent's belongings to use for display purposes, at least from families that are wealthy enough to have a viewing. When we host the viewing, and handle the burial, the shoes and jewelry end up resold to keep the lights on, since most of what we handle, in this part of District 6, are nameless bodies, scarred by overwork and morphling or the marks of suicide, no one showing up to claim them, no one capable of affording a burial.

Rich people, it turns out, die a lot less often than poor people.

Who woulda guessed it?

"We'll figure it out," I tell her. "I'll handle it tomorrow night."

Mrs. Kobayashi is the only named corpse we've had through the mortuary in the last week, apart from one of the three currently in the furnace. Things have been getting tight, and they'll only get tighter unless it's the _mayor's _house that's just gone up in smoke. Not super likely. That shit's made of stone.

What I'll handle is too potentially objectionable to be voiced aloud, even here, even between us, even by me. The fact of the matter is, dead people don't need the things they're buried with, and Mrs. Kobayashi isn't any kind of exception. The brass fixtures from the fancy coffin, after all, sit on a table to the side, where Aimon will have left them after prying them off.

The Marchand family makes it work.

My mom nods, averting her eyes just slightly as she does.

"We always do."

"Hey, I can help with her if you need, not like these guys are gonna walk up and go anywhere," I interject, gesturing at the furnace with my rolled-up magazine.

"Suit up, then," she says, "follow me."

The corpse on the dingy table is a very old woman, her hair long and greyed, tied up in a knot above her head, likely by my mother. Her skin has a waxy look to it, probably not too long dead, but still very dead-looking. I swing on a rust-stained apron and a pair of disposable gloves.

"No autopsy report," my mom says, checking the clipboard left by the woman's head. "Died in the hospital, a long time coming."

She smells like chemicals already, even without embalming intervention. Having seen hundreds if not thousands of bodies across this table, I think that I can pick up the sort of… meaty, but oddly sweet smell that comes from infection, and maybe a little something else, though it's hard to put my finger on it.

"Pneumonia?" I guess, leaning in and checking for any other immediate cause, breathing a little more deeply.

By now, I'm not sure there's anything I could do or say that would surprise my mom. After seventeen years of dealing with me, there's nothing to expect but the unexpected.

"Yes," she says, leafing through the clipboard. "Prediabetic, had a bad fall a few weeks back, hospitalized since, picked something up during her time in the ward… and now, here she is."

"Cool," I say.

Rather than talk any further, as she begins to get her tools together and assemble the various containers of embalming fluids, I begin to make the incisions on either side of the woman's neck. Even through the thin plastic of my gloves, I can feel the oddly papery way her skin yields, making it easy to find and slice open her left and right common carotid arteries.

The restricted cervical injection technique is favored for more delicate corpses that will be more closely viewed on display, especially those with potential damage to the arterial system due to disease. I place the thick drainage cannula in her right carotid, pin the left to prevent the pressure exerted by the old pump from blowing out Mrs. Kobayashi's facial features, and load up the first round of fluids with my mom's help.

We're used to working as a team at this sort of thing. Before I took an interest, she tried to train Alvah; my sister has a weak stomach, though, and that's kind of an anathema to any kind of embalming work. Silicon and preservatives flow in, and blood flows out. It's not a tremendously neat project, even when it goes perfectly.

My mom used to do this part alone, trained by her own mother, the one who passed the business on to us. It's funny how squeamishness runs through so many of my close relatives, given the nature of our work. My dad exclusively deals with the front-end stuff, my sister more inclined to maintenance and, when necessary, retrieval.

Aimon would probably prefer to wash his hands of the whole thing if he could, but he's just fourteen, and not quite old enough to put his foot down. _Or to properly load a coffin into the furnace_, I think, with a twinge of annoyance.

"Stop," my mom directs me, and I turn the pump off as the fluid begins to run out clear and pinkish.

No sense in using more than we need to.

"All good?" I ask, looking over the body myself as she makes the same appraisal.

"Yes. Well-placed," she adds, as I remove the cannula, tap off the embalming fluid, and set about closing up one side of the body.

She quickly gets to work on the other, and in no time, Mrs. Kobayashi could be washed out and waxen, yes, but has every appearance of sleeping soundly and being shaped like a human should be.

"Can you hold her jaw?" my mom directs.

I nod, slipping my fingers inside the dead woman's mouth, opening it from the inside as she produces a pair of pliers and turns on an additional lamp.

"Grip," she instructs me, and I hold. Mrs. Kobayashi firmly as she pulls out one, then two gold molars from the woman's lower jaw.

Exactly as finicky as I am about corpses, she then leans in, lifting the corpse's hard palate slightly, and checks for any in the upper row, with no luck.

"All good?" I suggest.

"All good," she sighs. "If you don't mind…"

I understand implicitly what she's asking, and scoop up the teeth, depositing them in a slightly bloody plastic bag to be washed and dealt with later. Gold is gold, fillings are fillings, and with enough effort, it's very possible to separate the metal from the enamel.

"I can handle the rest," my mom tells me. "Check in on the furnace, make sure it's not leaking again."

I put two fingers to my forehead to salute without realizing that they're covered in blood, and grimace, slightly, as my mom sighs. This is not the first time I've made this mistake, and it probably won't be the last.

"Lorean, _some_ common sense, please," she says, without any real pleading tone to it. It's more an observation than anything, as she finds a clean cloth, dips it in disinfectant, and crosses the room to clean the smear of blood off my brow.

"I'll give it a try," I promise.

"No, you won't," she sighs, but stands up on tiptoes to kiss me on the forehead and muss my hair slightly with an ungloved hand. "Love you, baby."

_It would actually be kind of disastrous if I were to develop any sort of sensibilities now_, I think to myself as I return to the furnace room, relieved to find that the patch I devised is holding firm and the air is as free of corpse-ash as it ever is, which is… not.

Disastrous, but wildly unlikely.

There's a sink in the furnace room, and while I wait, I scrub my hands and then the teeth, cleaning each individually until it's clear where the gold ends and the tooth begins.

At some point, the furnaces finish their cycle and begin to cool, and now I can hear raised voices and semi-frantic movement going on back in the autopsy room. I'm actually glad to miss it; dad, Alvah, and Aimon bring a weirdly nervous energy to the space when they're all crowded in together. My mom's mentioned as much herself. She and I are more alike than almost anyone, though it's not exactly something we can talk about.

There's a sort of practical relationship with the world and what we want from it that she and I have, and the rest of my family kind of doesn't.

I whistle a tune as I dig the gold out of each of the molars in turn with the pocketknife. One contains a lot more than it appeared to, at first glance. The other is just sort of layered with the stuff, barely sliver in the scheme of things. Not a bad haul, though. I slip the gold into my pocket, and return to my magazine.

It's a home and garden lifestyle thing, one of the stacks we usually keep on display in the waiting room, for the kinds of families that can afford to pay for a burial. Random decorative objects, fancy clocks, recipes, articles on style trends in the Capitol and a few sections on District 6 specifically, though not as many.

Apparently, squash is all the rage in the Capitol these days, and there's about three million things you can do with it. Who'd have guessed? Definitely not me. I'm not sure I've ever seen a squash. Wouldn't know one if I did.

Once the furnace has gone cold, I open each of the three doors, preparing a metal bin in which to collect the ashes, already tagged with the names and information of each decedent, or as much as we can get, anway. Cremation isn't classy. The height of class, as I understand it, is to get embalmed and dealt with like Mrs. Kobayashi's body, for display and ceremony, like, ideally in someone's own home. Even I think that's kinda messed up. Bodies are just bodies, after all. Can't imagine spending that much money on a dead person when they could just be ash and then you could be done with it all. The cardboard boxes we burn them in are a lot cheaper than coffins, after all.

"Hey, Lorean?" my brother calls, interrupting just as I finish binning the last of the ashes.

"Yeah, what's up?"

"Can you come help? There's a lot of them this time, and it's…"

"Gotcha, little bro."

I wash my hands, wipe the sweat from proximity to the furnaces out of my eyes, and head back up.

At first, it's like I haven't even left. The autopsy room smells like charred meat, no medical or health information to be divined from the smell of these corpses. There's an especially wretched undertone of burned plastic, and now that I'm in the room, I realize that it's not just my family standing around, making things uncomfortable.

There's a pair of armored Peacekeepers in smoke-stained uniformed, arms crossed, weapons worryingly visible.

"Hey guys," I say, specifically to the Peacekeepers. "How's it hanging?"

If they weren't helmeted, I think I'd see some eyebrows raised. Reading the tone of the room has never really been my deal.

As if in response to my greeting, one of them removed her helmet. She has the look of Six's upper class, clear dark eyes and straight black hair and a frown that could wither a field of wildflowers. So not a party mood.

Surrounded by corpses in varying stages of horrifically-burnt, I guess I probably could have guessed that.

"As I was saying," the now-helmetless Peacekeeper intones. "Mr. Tanaka's preparations will take precedence. We'll return in three hours to begin internment proceedings. Please conduct your business accordingly."

My mom bows, my dad bows, I figure I should probably bow, too, but I end up nearly knocking over one of the display urns from a rack we keep down here, since they don't all fit upstairs.

The Peacekeeper glares at me.

I smile.

"Sorry for your loss," I add, after a second.

"Koichi Tanaka's death was a tragedy," she observes. "We expect the highest standard of treatment in its aftermath. He has a young daughter. A viewable body is important."

My eyes flicker to the body in question, the only one wearing white armor, though it's blackened and peeling at the edges. The odds of a body this mutilated being display ready in three hours are… low, though I imagine the uniform has protected most of the internal structures.

Hasn't done a thing for his face, which is pretty much non-existent at this point. More a charred skull than something you'd recognize if you were, for instance, a young daughter of the corpse in question.

"Dunno what your standard of 'viewable' is," I say, perhaps stupidly, given that my father shoots me a 'what the fuck is wrong with you' look - not an unfamiliar expression to have directed at me.

"High," the Peacekeeper snaps.

On closer inspection, her ID reads 'Nakamura'.

"Well, Peacekeeper Nakamura, thank you for you counsel," my mom cuts in, before I can say something else unhelpful. "We'll do our utmost."

"See that you do," she says briskly, then turns on her heel and ushers out the still-helmeted Peacekeeper behind her.

"Hey, Aimon, just a question, uh, why the fuck did you think it was a good idea to bring Lorean in here?" Alvah says, crossing her arms and looking about ready to start her own fire.

Aimon isn't looking at her. He's looking at the flame-twisted bodies, many of them charred down to the bone.

"Ease off, Alvah, he's freaked out," I say.

"Yeah, and you getting us all shot or some shit is going to make everything a whole lot better."

"Alvah," my father interrupts. "Help me assemble the boxes for the next round of cremations."

She shoots me another annoyed look, but complies. Aimon disappears down to the furnace room to get them started again, and I turn to my mom.

"So, three hours," I say.

"Three hours," she agrees, looking appraisingly at the white armored body. "Best to get started."

I nod agreement, and we begin to strip the body of armor. A layer of congealed blood and skin, at least on the plates I remove from the extremities, comes off along with it. My mom begins to inspect the body and the face as I scrub and discard the armor, suiting up in the process, which had slipped my mind during the removal process.

She has a clipboard, looks over the largely undamaged torso, checks the mouth, eyes, stomach for irregularities.

"Lorean," she says hesitantly. "This might be a good one."

That stops me in my tracks.

We usually stick to teeth and jewelry, after all.

I didn't realize she knew about the rest. That was deliberate, after all, her not knowing.

"Smoke inhalation wouldn't affect the heart," she observes. "A lot is salvageable, here. If you work quickly."

So she knows about the organs.

My mom _does_ know me better than pretty much anyone else in the world.

"You're right," I agree, seeing no point in lying about it, if she's not shouting me down or disowning me or anything, which was a bit of a worry with my dad, I guess, but not her style at all.

I look up at her over the body, the bruised hollows under her eyes, the gauntness of her cheeks. We work to the bone over this, work no one else in the district wants to do. And where has it ever gotten us? Elbow deep in blood and char, going to sleep hungry at night, not always, but enough.

For lack of a gentler way of saying it, I prepare a cooler of ice from the humming old ice machine, and for the first time with my mother's help, though definitely not my first time in general, I strip the body of usable organs. Crack open ribs, sever connective tissue, stitch it all back together again once the good stuff is safely in the cooler.

"Can you handle the rest?" I say, as she prepares a series of syringes for a far more complicated embalming technique than usual, more difficult, of course, without a heart.

"Yes," she says. "You take care of this. If you can… if you're okay with…"

From the way she doesn't look at me, I know that she probably knows less than I suspected she might. Probably not the mechanics of it. Probably imagines me handing off a cooler to some shady character in a hat in the back of some darkened room, filled with cigar smoke and the sharp smell of morphling.

It's just the hospital, though. I just take them to the hospital, and trade them for a stack of credits the likes of which I wouldn't be likely to get from ten corpses' worth of jewelry, once the attendant has verified their health and usefulness in transplants.

And then I disappear into the night, and leave the credits on the table the next morning, and no one has to be the wiser. They just have to be good organs, and by the looks of it, this guy lived a damn clean life for someone dead by his mid-thirties, even if he did manage to end it in such a messy way.

"Oh, it's cool, it's generally cool," I say, taking the cooler - heavy, but not too heavy to manage, since I couldn't take the lungs of someone who died of smoke inhalation - and heading for the exit. "Don't worry, I gotcha."

I bump into Aimon on my way out, hurrying between my dad and Alvah and the autopsy room where my mother is waiting for him. He's cleverly dug up a tin of the putty we use to reshape features, correctly assuming that reconstructing the burned-up Peacekeeper's face is going to take more than the half-full vessel of material my mom typically keeps on hand.

He sees the cooler and goes white as a sheet.

"You said you weren't going to do that again," he says, so quietly that Alvah and my dad couldn't possibly hear.

I shrug with my free hand.

"Go to mom, little dude, it's not your problem."

This time. It's not his problem this time.

Last time I needed help, and I sure as hell wasn't going to ask Alvah to help me bring the lungs and liver of a brutally stabbed young woman to Watanabe General.

"Lorean, you can't," he says, voice wavering. "You said it was just once."

I lied. It was more than once by the time he had to get involved. It's been a lot more than once since then. What he doesn't know won't hurt him, y'know? And what he doesn't know keeps him fed and ensures we have clothes and electricity and heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer - do you know how bad a morgue can smell without air conditioning when the temperature is pushing 100?

It helps. I've been helping, the best way I know how.

We don't live a life like the people we dress up for death. We're never going to be the kind of people in home and garden magazines.

Not that I want him to cotton onto that. Shit would be a lot less depressing if I could go back to not understanding the way the world has to work. I figure the longer I can keep him ignorant, and comfortable, and well-fed, the better. He's a good kid, even if he doesn't have much of a spine.

Kids are just kind of like that.

"Help mom," I tell him, and lug the cooler out.

He's not wrong to worry. I know this isn't going to work forever. Behind me, even in the dark of night, the smoke belching out of the furnaces has begun afresh, turning the black sky grey and blocking out the stars.

It's going to work for now. And one of these days, I'm going to figure out a way out of here that isn't up the smokestack of a crematorium, into the cool night air above District 6. I've seen a lot of people die here, a lot of them my age, most of them already drugged up or strung out or scraped off the front of a train.

That's not going to be me.

Death is inevitable - dark, sure, but also _true_. An ad in the rolled-up magazine still in my pocket has been occupying my attention all day. Placed by the office of Mayor Tsuchiya. Making a whole set of promises for the brave soul who volunteers for the Hunger Games.

I dunno. I'm thinking about it. Been in the back of my mind all day.

Death, I mean.

And particularly ways I might be able to make mine count. Whether that's for my family or just for the fuck of it.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol

Another young one. On the precipice of the public announcement of the victors' reassignments as mentors, nonetheless, District 6 submitted all completed paperwork. Perfectly formatted, specifications exceeded rather than met.

She typically liked Mayor Tsuchiya, though An was impenetrably frosty. That was understandable. Even with the ace of Yuna's survival up her sleeve, she couldn't bring herself to try to push past the abrasive mentor's cold exterior. Perhaps, she mused, she was worried about what she'd find there.

After all, didn't they both have the reputations of poisoners to live down?

Not enough in common to start a friendship, of course, though for the moment, circumstances forced An to tolerate her whether she liked it or not. All of the mentors, really, though she continued to exercise almost superhuman caution with Saxaul, at Hero's behest. They had, after all, had their meeting. And while she and Hero endeavored not to keep secrets between them (secrets being a particularly potent toxin beyond anything that could come out of a lab) he had avoided discussing the content of that particular conversation ever since.

He got cagey when she so much as referenced it.

So she dropped the issue. No great loss. As likely as not, she wouldn't like what she were to find if she started to pry.

District 6, though, didn't seem to keep any secrets of the proposed volunteers. One, the first to apply, Livy Tanaka, only fifteen… had recently lost her father, an in-district Peacekeeper, to some kind of terrible fire. Sad, and potentially a compromising factor that might have prompted Marina to demand she be excluded, but the active-duty Peacekeeper mother made a compelling non-grief reason of its own. Lorean Marchand, older, at seventeen, had turned himself in for a long list of deeply unfortunate accusations, months later, in exchange for amnesty and the family support provisions that had been put in place by District 6's mayoral office.

They made sense, in a way. These would be Cora's tributes, and she wondered what her… well, increasingly her friend… might be getting into.

New mentors, Saxaul and Hero had both warned her at different intervals, always flamed out. Not a single first-year-out had managed to bring home a tribute. Not even Claudia, who'd waited years for her first victory outside of herself; not even Cereus.

Though some of that, she suspected, was more to do with politicking than skill or the misfortune of new mentors.

She didn't have any intentions of bringing politics into death order, at least. This would be a work of art. A horrible work of art, and of pure intentions. None of the standard dogfighting that she understood had been the norm during Head Gamemaker Chiron Rometo's tenure, and had persisted, in its way, through the reign of Annia Neves.

That was something she wouldn't have done, not by Hero and not by herself. She wouldn't choose a victor. She would simply choose a story, and the victor would be… the moral of it, not necessarily the hero.

And wasn't that how it was supposed to be, really?

Livy was fifteen, among the youngest she'd seen so far, but in the past the tributes had been thirteen, twelve. It was a balancing act, the humanity and the horror. Because too humane and the horror was muted, and too horrible and the indictment of the Games became an inescapable indictment of herself.

For now, she was okay. She was steady on the tightrope. Would approve these tributes immediately and move on, businesslike, pragmatic, to the next task, as it should be.

How should it be?

Over. It should be over.

And she was well on her way to making that happen.

With a tired noise, she closed the hard copy folder, stared up at the wall, where her degrees hung neatly, and bit her lip until it bled.

It would be over. Eventually. For good.

x

_Blogs are hard, have another intro chapter, I'm workin' on it, I promise! Thank you to those of you letting me know your #thoughts, I've been getting hardcore into the planning, and while I plan flexibly (Memento Mori had like four different Explicitly Planned Victors over the course of writing it) your feedback matters a lot as these things get put into motion!_

_Halfway in, I'm really interested in who you're liking, who you want to hear more from, who you think might make good allies (or might rip each other limb from limb) and, just for the fun of it, if you had to guess at a victor from this crew… who do you think might make a good moral to the story of the final Games?_


	11. Unconditional Surrender (or, District 7)

Unconditional Surrender (or, District 7)

x

i'm telling you.  
if i gave them everything they've asked  
for, i would already be dead.

'Crisis Actor', Maggie Woodward

x

Alder Seracot, District 7

"So, uh," I say, leaning forward to rest my elbows on the registrar's desk. "How does the amnesty work?"

The woman behind the desk is probably somewhere in her fifties, with dark eyes, wrinkled at the edges from smiling. The rest of her skin is clear and brown, until the line of her jaw is interrupted by a neatly knotted hijab in a floral print. She could be anyone's doting grandmother. Kind of the platonic ideal of one, like any second she might whip out a plate of cookies, or, like, whatever it is that a grandmother would do outside of a Capitol television program.

Not like I'd know.

I hold my breath as she rifles through the papers on her desk.

"I'm sorry, dear," she says. "I've been slow to catch onto the digital… movement, this may take a second. I suppose you want the full text?"

"Yeah," I say, moving my hands back out of view so that I can clench and unclench my fists without attracting her attention.

After a second, she produces a document printed on slightly heavier paper, pulling it out of the stack with a flourish. The President's seal is evident at the top of the document, foiled and shiny under the fluorescent lights of her office.

"Here we are," she announces, tilting the paper so I can get a look at it as she reads aloud. "A full legal pardon will be extended to any permanent resident of District Seven upon selection as volunteer for the 90th Hunger Games for any past violations of Panem's law, contingent on the completion of all necessary documentation and Capitol recognition of the legitimacy of the applicant. Ah! Quite a mouthful."

"So can I do it?" I cut in immediately, the words having been bubbling in my chest since long before I approached the Justice Building this evening.

"I've got all the paperwork you'll need," the registrar tells me. "Mr…?"

"Seracot," I say. "Alder Seracot."

A flash of recognition crosses her face, making my stomach turn just slightly before her expression lapses into pity. Much, much worse. District 7, in theory, has a lot going for it. A lot of us, especially public officials, like to believe that to the point where they practically go blind the second something doesn't fit with what they want to think about themselves and the place that they live.

What's fucked up here has got to be an aberration, has to be removed, pushed out of view, ignored until it can be politely laughed about.

That's part of why I think I'll make such a stellar volunteer.

"This specific provision, you understand, doesn't grant any sort of pardon to… family members."

No, District 7 isn't where anyone would choose to be the son of a well-known whore, if that was something you could choose.

"Yeah," I reply sharply, well and truly casting aside any illusions I had about this lady having any reason to give a shit about me, whether she looks like the kind of person who'd have secret family recipes and smell like baking bread all the time or not. "You _just _read it aloud. I was listening."

She makes a face, half patronizing concern, half rising annoyance.

This is typically the point where things fall apart. I can hold up a polite mask for a while. For a long while, if no one actively tries to push it off my face. The balance, though, is always delicate, and even from this… random lady, someone I've never met before it my life and will hopefully never encounter again, a fairly minor presumption is enough to do it.

Bad timing.

I'm trying to negotiate my way into a volunteer position, not a jail cell.

So I grit my teeth, sink my nails even deeper into my palms, and summon up a thin smile that, from her reaction, must be quite unsettling, confirm some shitty thing she believes about me already. Fucking _good_!

"All of that sounds great," I say. "I'm sold."

Keeping it short, sweet, not coursing with hot anger or cold _need _to do something… she's not a big woman, delicate under her brightly-colored clothing, and at her age… a letter opener on her desk… would that exclude me from volunteering?

"So, if you're committed, then, we've got a packet that'll give you an idea of what to expect if you're selected," she begins.

"_If_?" I interrupt.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. Maybe shouldn't be surprising, with the level of hero-worship of Saxaul and, lately, _Manari_ that we have going on in this ridiculous district, the extent to which the utter fucking sheep around my age have let their presence within our borders convince them that volunteering is some kind of honorable thing, that it'll lead to doing anything fundamentally _good _beyond, sure, putting your neck on the line for the end of the Games, fine.

Probably should have seen that coming. The self-righteous piece of shit quotient in my age group is so high these fucking days.

"You didn't think you were the only young man to express interest in volunteering, did you? Why, with the applications we've been handing out, I think we're singlehandedly keeping the paper mills in business. All this… digital… well, you know. Not everyone brings them back, and you're not obligated to yourself, of course! But know you're not the only one, and the strength of your application will matter."

"Who's gonna read this?" I ask, pointedly ignoring her tone, which is just the wrong side of condescending, flipping through the several pages, pinned together with a twist of metal.

"We have a panel, including myself, Mayor Jibreel, Saxaul, and a Capitol representative, though I'm not yet certain who that will be," she says patiently.

My frown deepens.

"And do you know, like, what they're… what you're looking for?"

"I can't speak for anyone else, but I certainly hope to send someone who will _win_," she says, smiling slightly. "Any other questions?"

_Yeah_, I want to say, _a whole goddamned list of them, because that's the most unhelpful advice I've ever heard, nice_.

And also, unfortunately, verification of the fact that if I did something stupid, here and now, that wouldn't help my odds of getting picked. Would definitely hurt them. Like I mentioned, not putting my name in the running for a jail cell, here, if I can avoid it. The opposite of that. Amnesty.

"No," I say stiffly, and if she sees the muscles tightened in my jaw and neck, my nails dug deep enough to draw blood from the palms of my hands, knotted into tight fists, she wisely doesn't mention it.

Just nods, smiles, stands with some effort, and ushers me out.

It's a misty, overcast day, as most days are in District 7. I'm fresh out of a shift at the papermill this morning - which is why I'm somewhat divided on whether it's a good thing that the Office of the Registrar is keeping the place in business or whether the whole fucking place could burn down and it'd be a relief.

How come Saxaul's gotta be on the selection committee, when we know by now that he's not even going to be our mentor? A few months from now, there's an announcement set to be made, some kind of lottery, but it'd be stupid for me to wait that long, knowing the kind of overachieving motherfuckers we have in District 7, how the second they heard he'd be reading applications half of them probably signed up just to include love notes in their personal statements.

I sigh, leafing through the application on the steps as I wait for the trolley that I took here in the first place to loop back around, which will bring me to the mill, within walking distance of home.

Yeah, a personal statement first, itemized lists of physical skills and references to support whatever claims the applicant decides to make. The thought of including references, for fuck's sake - what, my boss, to verify that I can work a stockroom and lift thirty pounds? - makes me frown even more deeply.

I guess I should spout off about wanting to be part of the end of the Games, like everyone else will, knowing our only victor's predilections in that area. That's not totally _not_ true. I mean, nothing wrong with having my name lauded in the history books for the next few generations.

They've never been something I've been especially afraid of, though. Same shit, different place. Worst that can really happen is a few days of getting fattened up in the Capitol, and then… whatever you can make of it. And that's kind of how it's always been, or how it's seemed, for me if for no one else in this district. My walk home from the Justice Building is a long one, would be hours if there wasn't a trolley to catch for the first leg. For a long time, I've lived far enough from Seven's city center to be more or less untouched by the kind of brilliant improvements that people are always going on about.

Paper mills, like the one where I've been picking up part-time work for the last few years, still leach chemicals into the water, though the thought is that it's 'less' these days. As long as there's a demand in the Capitol for perfectly-bleached white cardstock, there'll be toxic shit to dispose of in the aftermath of making it, and there's only so much that the mayor can do about that, when the district doesn't technically own the mill.

No one starves with the soup kitchens, obviously, but there's no _pride_ in depending on soup kitchens, either, and my mom is - was? - a _proud _woman, in her way, which is a bizarre and convoluted way, but a _way_ nonetheless. And she managed to land herself in prison often enough to leave me on my own well before I had the sense to figure out the trolleys and get myself fed once the cupboards were bare.

There's nothing anyone can do, not the Mayor, not a victor with a guilt complex, not the stupid registrar, _none _of them can do a fucking thing about a shitty parent.

In that way, I'm better than all of them.

Because I handle my shit - _handled_ it, really.

There are things worth escaping, even before you get to considerations of amnesty, which are… recent.

Obviously, I've thought about what I could make of it. No rules, just… real choices, uninfluenced by anyone with more power than you, except for, like, trainees. And even a trainee can die, and statistically, most of them do. Who _hasn't_ thought about it? It's an even more serious consideration for me than it is for the the idiots with a raging hard-on for _justice_ or whatever.

I don't mind the idea at all.

And anyone really _can _win, when you look at the track record. If he hadn't pulled things off the way he did, it'd be easy to mistake Saxaul for any skinny high-schooler on the factory line. And then there's people like Corsage, who show you, well… anyone can win, and anything can be forgiven, or at least forgotten about, given enough time.

The application feels oddly light in my hand.

How do I express any of this stuff in writing?

"Hey, Seracot!" someone calls from the steps of a dilapidated government-construction house.

Instinctively, I avert my eyes, look down, a habit leftover from walking these same streets when I was younger. I can deal with just about anything any asshole thinks to throw my way, these days, but it doesn't change the reality that, upon entering this part of town, for most of my life, I had to be ready to run.

Especially from the kind of person who knew my name, because that meant the kind of person who _knew _my mother.

"Yo!" the person calls again, and I look up, any attempt to ignore them forgotten. "Where you headed, huh?"

"Just on my way to your mom's place, y'know," I snap, knowing full well what the retort will be.

"Yours ain't good enough for you?

"Yours is cheaper."

It's not just one guy - shit. There's a whole crew on the steps, a few I recognize, a few I don't. Mostly recent dropouts, same as me. The sort of people who, if this application doesn't work, I'm gonna have to spend the rest of my life stewing around with.

Idiots, every single one.

"Fuck off - hey, Alder, _Alder_, don't fucking _walk away from me _-"

Oh, delightful, and now he's following me. I turn on my heel, hoping to move fast and get an idea of who's struck out with the guy, but I'm a little too late, and his fist closes on the application I've got rolled in my hand.

Jonathan isn't anything special as far as residents of the neighborhood go, pale-skinned with watery blue eyes under a thatch of curly blonde hair. He's tall, but not taller than me, and he's flanked by a guy I don't recognize and a skinny girl I know he's fucking around with, Sitka or Syca or something common.

"Hey," he says, tightening his grip on the paper. "You broke Sitka's brother's arm."

"I've broken lots of people's arms," I say, keeping my tone as level as I can. "He was probably getting into some shit he shouldn't have."

"Nah, that's you. What the fuck is this? You still in school? Got you fucking homework- shit, what kind of paper is this?"

He must recognize the high quality of the document. Unfortunately, it's something we all know plenty about, in just a few years at the mill. He makes a very real effort to rip it out of my hands, and I sigh, realizing this is a fight I'm actually going to have to have.

With the force he's exerting trying to pull the thing out of my grip, it's pretty easy to turn his momentum around on him and knock him off balance with an elbow to the jaw and a sharp shove with my shoulder. He doesn't quite fall like a sack of rocks, but he does stumble back, giving me enough time to pull a knife on him.

"I'll do more than break your guy's fucking arm if you don't get him out of my fucking face," I tell Sitka, zeroing in on her as the weak point in the trio.

Two birds, one stone. She grabs Jonathan by the elbow and hisses something to him. I shift to threatening the third guy, but he's already taken a few paces back, wisely putting space between us.

"Go ahead. Call the Peacekeepers if you want," I say. "Hope you can hold out fifteen minutes, 'cause the nearest one's probably busy _fucking my mom_. That's enough time to bury a fucking body."

It's an empty threat. It takes hours to dig a decent grave, and coincidentally, my mom's not going to be fucking anyone for a good long while. None of them know that.

No one else bothers me on my way home, though I do flip up the collar of my work shirt to hide my face, just a bit. I try to walk softly, since fucking around in this part of the district, where everyone's equally messed up and cast aside, pretty much, isn't a good bet, but as evidenced by whatever dumb fight I got myself into that drew heat from Jonathan and his boys, I'm not always good about that.

Home is a three-room house, another government constructed model, actively falling apart. The overgrown vegetable garden in the back is the only part of the property with any sign of having been recently touched, and with a few more afternoon thunderstorms, that'll be invisible.

The humidity is relentless, though. I stop to pick at the bandages on my cheek and chin, which I've been trying to ignore. Inside, the house still smells like bleach, but not so much like blood and alcohol as it did a few nights past.

My mom is nowhere anyone is likely to find her if anyone, Peacekeepers or otherwise, comes calling. They have, already. I can only send them away so many times before a client gets suspicious - that's the only way this is going to fuck me over, but there's… well, there's a chance of it. I smooth out the papers on the rickety kitchen table.

It's been a week since my mom finally got drunk enough to really try to kill me, and a week since she realized just how not-kindly I take to a fucking knife in the face, family or not.

How's that for a personal statement? I look back at the application.

Bad idea, probably. Shouldn't be too explicit. I really just want to get this done and head to bed, but when I sit down to hammer something out, I find that the blood is still risen from the confrontation in the street, my face still hot.

My pen digs into the paper almost thick enough to rip, if it wasn't such high quality cardstock. I grimace down at my own work. The question is worded almost flippantly for something that'll determine so completely where or how I live or die, maybe.

"Why you?"

_I've done bad things. If I stay here, I'm going to do more of them. It won't be my mom next time. It'll be someone you actually give a shit about. You can stop me permanently by sending me to the Games._

That shouldn't be enough to get me thrown in prison if I'm not selected. No one at the Mayor's level gives enough of a shit to really investigate a whore's disappearance, even with a lead. She won't be the first of her kind to drop off the map in the line of duty. Talked about that often enough, like I should be grateful for the risk she was taking, somehow.

Knowing what I'm capable of, who the fuck would turn me down?

District 7's done a great job of making it clear that I'm not good enough for this district, fucked from association by birth.

Time to see if I'm _bad_ enough for the powers that be.

x

Janina Tamalak, District 7

What's a door, really? Just one door. Worn wood, glass clouded with age and the temperature difference between the air conditioned gymnasium and the already swelteringly hot morning. It's like standing outside in a thick fog, basically, for all I'm sweating and for all the air is drenched in moisture.

Just one stupid door.

I take a breath. Last night, I fell asleep practicing what I would do if someone stopped me. I'd be honest, right away, because that's how you keep on the right side of things. Nothing you learn faster in a house jam-packed with siblings than the fact that… well, everything's easier if you tell the truth the first time, don't cloud the glass any further with falsehoods. Who can keep track of a lie when you can barely keep track of your shoes among sisters and brothers?

I've already lied enough to get to this point, and that burden is heavy on my shoulders as it is.

Someone will stop me, grip me by the arm, tell me that I don't belong here, send me home, someone who knows my parents, someone who will tell my parents that one of their daughters, on a Friday morning, no less, a holy day, was sneaking around somewhere she had no place. Here at a gym, where I categorically don't belong, public building or not.

_All the evils of the world are locked in a room, and lying is the key_. The imam of our mosque is way too fond of repeating that admonition for me to just forget it, especially now, my heart racing, hand on the slightly worn brass handle.

It's not locked. I can feel that it isn't locked. When I tug, just a little, a rush of cool air parts the gap between the double-doors, blowing strands of hair away from my face, where the beads of sweat on my brow had been sticking them. It would be so much nicer inside. Just have to get it together enough to…

Do it.

And then, there I am.

I push my way through into the lobby of the public gymnasium. Fluorescent lights hanging overhead, dull and buzzing but illuminating the space, since the sun hasn't yet risen enough to really pass through the massive, somewhat clouded windows. Tree cover, yes, but also the earliness of the hour.

At least I thought I would be alone.

That's kind of an unfamiliar thing for me. I'm the twelfth out of seventeen children, mostly twins, though I was just a single child myself. My parents are pretty serious about the 'having lots of kids' thing, and they aren't bad people, aren't like, neglectful, or anything, but at the same time… they have seventeen kids, and in our house it's easy to blend into a swirl of complete chaos. The gym is the quietest place I've been in a long time, since even the woods, a more typical refuge, tends to be noisy with birds and animals and rustling leaves and other sounds of life.

When I peek through into the main chamber, even though it's five in the morning, I'm somehow not the only person who's decided to come here this morning.

Someone's definitely working out.

Before I can figure out anything else about the situation, I flinch back, out of sight, but also out of range to figure out the situation. I made it this far, right? That's not nothing. No, that's not nothing at all. Maybe I can come back tomorrow. Maybe I can make myself wake up even earlier and make the hour long walk, get here exactly when it opens.

Or is the person I saw the person who opens the gym?

Will they just be here whenever I show up?

My cheeks burn, and I feel stupid, ashamed, knowing I should have realized this would never work. What was I thinking, spending three hours after school this Wednesday getting the paperwork from the Justice Building, lying to my parents and Jaaram, who's the oldest brother still in the house and the only one who actually thought to ask about where I'd been, why my part of the chores wasn't done and Kamilah and Naba had to handle the setup for supper that night themselves, and I'm just… it's pointless.

It's stupid.

I'm being stupid.

And I thought this was a good idea, to get away for a little, to have something just for _me_, for once, even something terrible, but there's no place in the world that's just for me, no thing that I can just have, no place that I can just be alone.

"Is someone there?" a voice calls, echoing in the cavernous gymnasium, and I choke on my own throat and freeze.

What was I _thinking_? I can't even run away properly.

There's a sound that I don't recognize, sort of like a zipper being drawn closed or the chain of a bicycle whirring at high speed, and I only have time to force myself to take a few shaky steps back before…

Oh, I've really messed up.

The man who emerges from the gym is seated, which is odd for a second, though it quickly prompts my sense of recognition. Not just the operator of the gym. Damn my luck. Utterly damn it.

Manari Issa, the runner-up and only known survivor of the 89th Hunger Games, scowls at me as though I've personally offended him by cowering in the shadow of the second set of double-doors, propped open, leading into the gym.

I suppose I probably have.

At least he doesn't know my parents, thank _God._

"Sorry," I say hastily, taking several more steps back, nearly tripping on my long skirt.

"I don't suppose you have a reason for lurking in the lobby of the gymnasium?" he says scathingly. "You're not exactly dressed for it."

I blink.

"Ah, I was just leaving."

"Fascinating," he says, and begins to wheel himself back into the gym.

This is the closest I've ever been to someone this famous. I find myself following him without really meaning to, and his chair makes the noise I heard before, the sort of mechanical fast-paced clicking as he maneuvers expertly across the mats.

He pauses after a second, turns on one wheel, shockingly fast.

"I thought you were leaving."

"I… I was," I say.

"Do you need me to whip out a dictionary and explain what the word means?"

"...do you need a _dictionary_ to know the definition of 'leaving'?" I say back, quickly, aware that this is the sort of thing that any of my older siblings would quickly dismiss as backtalk and a symptom of my having too much time on my hands, needing to spend more of it sweeping or scrubbing countertops, probably.

So this would be my cue to cower and apologize some more.

Instead of, I don't know, snapping at me or something, though, he snorts, like he finds my not-quite-a-coherent-retort funny rather than annoying.

"Apparently _you_ do. You missed the exit back there."

Without another look, he turns back, wheels himself to a set of bars, and resumes what looks like set of pull-ups, which I guess is what I interrupted.

I stand in place, feeling as though my feet are glued to the mat, just watching.

"As a dear friend once put it," he says, a touch of dark humor in his tone, lowering himself back to his chair after a shocking number, turning to find me still standing, open mouthed, where he left me, "take a picture, it will last longer."

"Sorry," I say. "I…"

"Clearly you're not here for no reason. If you don't want to share that reason, you probably ought to head home and think on it," he adds. "Rather than waste any more of my time."

"What are you doing here?" I ask, after a second, which isn't a reply, but is pretty much the only thing on my mind.

"Pull-ups."

"...but…"

"I'm still in the district because I've been working out of Seven, lately. And I'm _here_ because that's no excuse to vegetate. It's a dangerous world. Poorly dressed little girls lurking around every corner."

"I'm not poorly dressed," I say abruptly. "Or little, actually."

Why not keep digging, at this point?

"Why are _you _here?"

He crosses his arms, which are corded with muscle beneath his dark skin. For the first time, I really look at him, almost in the eyes, trying to actually think, process, why _am _I here?

"I'm going to volunteer," I say. "If they let me. I think they might."

With a long sigh, he turns back to the bar, reaches up, and begins another set of pull-ups.

"So you're stupid, then," he says, voice alarmingly even as he works.

"I'm not stupid."

"You're volunteering."

"_You_ volunteered."

"Yes, and it was the stupidest thing I've ever done. I acknowledge that, as most victors do, with the fringe benefit of not having myself been a victor. Are you suicidal? Is that the issue?"

My cheeks are flushing, against all of my efforts to make myself look tall and sure of myself and confident in my choices.

"I'm not suicidal."

"Good to hear. Then you've got no business volunteering."

"...I already did," I say. "Can't un-ring a bell."

At this, he pauses again, takes a second to re-seat himself, and turns to face me.

"So you _are _stupid, is what you're saying."

"Guess so," I concede, not willing to go into all of the reasons, since they feel so trivial when I really dwell on them, and I don't want to hear him say that, which would make it all almost too real to fathom.

How do you explain to someone for whom preparing for this was their whole life, who's apparently suffered from the Games enough to just… forgo all of that, scrap his allegiance to his district of birth… that volunteering is just… well, it's an opportunity, and it's kind of the only one I've ever had to be anything but the twelfth Tamalak the civics teacher has ever taught?

That my mom usually doesn't get my name right, even with so many of my sisters married out of the house by now, and if this doesn't make her, make my father, make anyone _see me_, nothing ever will?

And I'll die honorably, as myself, as Janina, someone worth remembering and writing about and thanking, part of something bigger, not a number in a birth order or a reasonably-well-behaved student with no identifying characteristics beyond slightly-above-average grades, which might as well not matter, since most of Seven's industry doesn't hire based on academics, anyway. Who'll do nothing more remarkable than get married someday, work as a schoolteacher or a secretary, bear a few children and die?

He sighs.

"What about your family?"

"I… they're going to have to deal with it," I say, feeling my face flush anew, reaching up nervously to tuck my hair behind my ear. "But I figure they'll find plenty of comfort in their _sixteen other children_."

This actually seems to give him a moment of pause, and he's back to looking at me appraisingly.

"Someone's going to lose a child," I add. "Someone with a daughter. Might as well be someone… no one will really miss. Who they've already half forgotten."

"Oh," he says, looking very uncomfortable. "Please don't cry."

"I'm not crying!" I insist, my eyes hot and wet.

Surprisingly, something about my insistence makes him laugh. He reaches over his shoulder to take a neatly rolled white hand towel from a basket affixed to the back of his chair, then takes a second one and lobs it to me, underhand.

I catch it, frowning at him as I dab at my eyes.

"I wasn't."

"Of course you weren't," he says.

"Look, I know I've messed up," I tell him. The towel smells like bleach and nice cotton. My family isn't the worst off at all, but our towels are all thin and greyed out with age, not crisp and white like this. "This, being here, you know… I just… don't… know. And I feel like such a hypocrite now."

"Well, go on."

"I figured the best thing I could do for myself, once I did it, put in the paperwork or whatever, was to try to face it. Even though that kind of undermines it, right? The idea from the start, that I'd just go in and be seen and… any idea of martyrdom or whatever."

"What," he laughs. "So you're not planning on killing a quarter of the arena? And yet, you're in a _gym_? The hypocrisy. How devastatingly shameful."

My cheeks must be vividly red.

"You can't do much dressed like that. Do you have pants? The next time you come to the gym, wear something fitted that allows you full range of motion. Is the lawfulness a concern?"

"Huh?"

"So you won't catch the hem of your dress in a machine and end up dropping forty pounds on your hand trying to get it out. Unless it's a sympathy ploy for sponsors with an idiot fetish."

"I… oh, I have pants, yeah," I say, looking down at my loose-fitting sweater and long skirt, which, in hindsight, are probably the best evidence that I didn't really think my plans for this morning through.

"Bring water or a vessel to hold it," he adds, then begins to wheel himself to a rack of weights, easily lifting one about the size of my head.

I'm back to sort of drifting after him, hand towel scrunched in my grip, wondering if this is some kind of weird dream.

"Can I… what are you doing with that?" I ask, as he holds the weight close to his chest, lifts it slowly and deliberately above his head, and brings it back down to elbow-level.

"Start at that end of the rack," he says, pointing at a ten-pound weight.

Without questioning, I comply. Used to this kind of thing, growing up knowing implicitly than anyone older than me could tell me what to do basically whenever and I'd just have to take it. Even though the weight is disappointingly small, less than a fraction of what he's lifting, I realize as I hoist it up and try to emulate his movements that it's _hard_.

"You're going to need practice with weapons," he tells me, a minute later, when my forehead is positively beaded with sweat, and he irritatingly isn't perspiring at all. "It's not hypocrisy to defend yourself. You're not a prophet, you're a child who's made a choice, and not an ignoble one. That's my condition for any of… this. You're not just going in there to be slaughtered like a kid at Eid, you understand?"

"I don't know if they'll accept me at all," I pant. "Just in the spirit of honesty, like, it's kind of early to decide to help me."

A little hopeful, there. I'm not a _bad _writer. My teachers have always said so, though couched in comparisons to my oldest sister Zainab, who writes speeches for Mayor Jibreel now, or any of my other siblings. My application was strong.

I'll allow myself that pride.

When it comes down to it, I can really do good academic work. I'm… good at a lot of things, if people would just pay attention. Pride is toxic, I know, I can see where it's gotten me so far, it's… but it's true.

"The worst that can happen is that you'll have tried to improve yourself for nothing," he says flatly.

I think worse could probably happen, whether or not I get chosen. The second my family finds out, actually, worse could happen. This isn't the kind of thing good daughters do behind their parents' backs.

"Thanks," I say. "I don't know what I did to deserve this -"

"Allah provides for whom he wills," he says brusquely. "You needed help. Here I am. Frankly, this is more convenient than figuring out how to get you home would have been. And imagine the hassle of mopping up the consequences of your failing to use the equipment without proper instruction."

"Oh."

For a second, as he returns the weight to the rack and takes two smaller ones, I watch him, trying to reconcile the reality of a person with having watched his Games, years ago, yes, but since they were the last ones before the hiatus, it's impossible not to recall them with clarity.

District 7 has never been the most involved with the Games, though after Saxaul's victory, some measure of interest was reignited. If his public appearances are to be believed, he utterly hates that, but people like to think… well, that we have a chance, in the scheme of things, that Seven can stand on its own two feet in competition, even someone normal, like him, just a person.

So obviously everyone was watching when Fidan made it to the final seven, and everyone was… well, after she died, having been allied with him, a lot of people redirected the intensity of their support for her to him. We watched together, for the finale, several of my older siblings even bringing along their children, coming back to the family home for it.

Jaaram has a poster with Manari's face on it in his room.

Oh, he's going to be so _jealous_.

My stomach flips as I think about it. How this isn't just a chance meeting that I can brag about. He was right, really, it was just stupid of me, volunteering, even if the tree is already half-felled, teetering before it hits the ground. Even if there's a chance I won't be chosen. I still lied, snuck around...

This is going to hurt things with my family.

"Are you alright?" he asks, just a touch of concern in his expression. "I mean, clearly not. Switch to three pounds, you'll hurt yourself with the ten if you try to follow me in these next sets."

"Just, uh, my… you know. Family and stuff."

"Right, you mentioned that. Are things alright at home?"

He says it casually, continues to move normally, but I realize from the way he watches for my answer that he hasn't missed a thing I've said or a motion I've made, that he's taken in how twitchy and evasive I've been this whole time. And he's _worried about me_, someone he doesn't even know.

The knot of muscle in my stomach seems to migrate from my stomach to my throat, and I wonder if I'm going to cry again.

"Really, they are," I say, with a strength of tone that I can already tell is convincing no one.

Things are _great_, if I don't step out of line or make trouble or make a mistake.

But sometimes I do, and when I do, it's like I might as well be dead to my parents until I earn my way back into their recognition, and I… I never talk about this, no one does, but there's nothing lonelier than having no one to talk to in a household of ten people.

And here I am, messing up with what I'm doing this very second. Lying, I _lied_ to them...

"That's good to hear," he says evenly. "How about we plan to meet here a few mornings a week? Just until you hear back from the selection committee. You must have class today -"

That snaps me out of whatever weird fugue state I was in, and I scramble to find a clock on the wall. Not late, but _near enough_ to being late to break out in a cold sweat that has nothing to do with exertion.

"Oh, yes," I say quickly. "I'll be back… mornings, I'll come back."

The slight furrow in his brow suggests that he doesn't completely believe me.

"I hope you do," he says, which is actually a huge relief, since I kind of still keep expecting someone to jump out from behind a workout bike and tell me I'm in the wrong place, doing something wrong, should be… well, anywhere else.

It's nice that someone wants me somewhere for something other than my value as a dishwasher, I guess. He studies my face again, and I try not to visibly squirm with discomfort.

"The later you tell your family, the worse it will be. I know it's difficult. Do it anyway."

I swallow around the lump still lodged in my neck.

Is it worse if they're angry with me, if they treat me like some kind of misbehaving dog, or is it worse if they don't care?

"Until next time," he says pointedly, nodding towards the door.

"Thank you," I say. "I really, uh…"

"Don't be so quick to thank me. Frankly, don't mention it. Ah. I'm… did I ask your name?"

He didn't.

"Janina," I say.

"Well, Janina, get to class, and try not to get yourself into any other death cults on the way."

I nod, push my hair back behind my ears, set down the weights, and nearly trip over my skirt running for the door. Somewhere behind me, he's laughing again.

Emerging from the gym and into the streets is utterly bizarre. It's every bit as hot and damp and muggy as it was when I spent fifteen minutes idling outside the door in the first place, but indescribably different. Less terrifying, or more? It's a little like waking up from an impromptu afternoon nap, realizing the light has changed and you can't remember what you were supposed to be doing, where you should be. But with none of the fear, I decide, after thinking it over for a second.

That, at least, is good.

The paralyzing part of the terror has bled out.

A gaggle of girls from my year pass on the sidewalk without particularly noticing me. Familiar faces, a few even in my class. On their way to school, which is still a real place I need to get.

"Hey, Karira!" I call. "Resa! Wait up!"

I'm back to sprinting, hindered badly by my skirt, in an effort to join them, as Karira turns and literally makes eye contact and waves, but doesn't slow down. For once, though, it doesn't sting so badly when I find myself walking in the back of a crowd of people I sort of think of as my friends.

Maybe that's a bad takeaway, but whatever I was trying to do by volunteering…

I think it might work.

x

Herodotus Snow, The Capitol

The worst thing about Marina was the fact that she was maddenly, infuriatingly, near-ubiquitously _right _about everything.

It was difficult to reconcile that with how much he relied on her, not just materially, as she was generous with the inheritance that his great uncle had denied the rest of the family, but in the sense that he wondered very much if he would ever socialize outside of work without her relentless efforts to involve him in her bizarre social machinations, with the victors, as always, at the center of the whole mess.

He couldn't say that he completely hated it. Introverted or not, he was hardly antisocial, and the weekly dinners kept him from retreating into a near-impenetrable shell built meticulously over the course of a lonely childhood.

But did she _have_ to go and shatter it all by making him a cornerstone of this plan to end-the-Games-with-more-Games? Not as though he wasn't well-accustomed to playing straight man to her comic in their familial double-act.

The projected selections for District 7's tributes were accounted for in a packet on the coffee table, he sighed and rubbed at his eyes, which was terrible - it caused wrinkles, he _knew _that - but the whole affair was so damned exhausting, and had somehow managed to wreck just about every part of his life that he sincerely enjoyed.

It was all fairly typical.

The good Marina giveth, and the good Marina, she taketh away.

Unfortunately, she had seemed to be wrong, thus far, at least, about Saxaul reaching out and ending the frigid silence to which they'd all been more or less subjected to since he'd returned to the Capitol and moved in with Cora the week before.

She was wrong - he hadn't called within the week.

Disappointingly, she always seemed to be right about the awful things. Though Saxaul must have been involved in the near-immediate selection process that had gone on in District 7, practically as soon as the last of the volunteers had submitted their applications, it had been nothing but radio silence apart from a few messages Marina had relayed from Cora.

He was 'doing well', or 'tired', or 'thought the new season of A Capitol Experience was garbage'.

It was oddly patronizing, hearing about how someone so important to him was holding up in what must be an apocalyptically terrible time via what was essentially an elaborate game of telephone. And it was agony, not really knowing what Saxaul thought of… well, selfishly, what he thought of Hero's part in things.

To an extent, he just wanted him to shout him down, call him worse than complicit in the murders that were about to be on his hands, and just get over it. The anticipation was, in a way, worse than anything he could actually say. Probably.

He just wanted to know, god damn it.

In a huff, more annoyed with himself, he picked up the files and a pen to annotate them, as he had with all of the past volunteers they'd received. He was militant about hard copies of everything for security and privacy reasons as much as for the pleasant sense of moral superiority that a good pen and paper seemed to afford him at a time when something to the effect of thirty percent of Capitol students graduated without the ability to write by hand.

Those numbers were lower than they'd been in the past, under his great uncle's government, in which writing by hand was treated in equal parts as a privileged skill and the kind of low, debasing act that should only be expected of residents of the districts.

District 7 was interesting, as usual. A girl who fancied herself some sort of martyr and a noted delinquent with a record that took several pages to flip through. He found himself wondering as he read through their responses and the selection committee's analysis exactly what role Saxaul had taken on in the process. Which was idiotic, like a bleeding wound from a bitten lip that would heal if he would just stop worrying at it with his tongue.

His apartment, meticulously neat, last straightened in a fit of nervous energy a few hours earlier upon receiving the profiles from Seven in the first place, was growing darker as the sun set and the floor-to-ceiling windows no longer served as a light source. He frowned as the document became progressively more difficult to read, waving to activate the lights in his living room, but only succeeding in reaching a few lamps.

It would have been cozy, sitting on the couch with a glass of wine in the warm golden light, the skyline still glowing purple and pink in the aftermath of the sunset, but the task was downright depressing, and he found his face contorting in displeasure as he listed relevancies in backstory to leverage, areas in which he'd want to cross-reference psychological profiles with those of other volunteers.

A knock at his door nearly gave him a heart attack, his pen slipping unbecomingly halfway through recommending that Alder's inclinations for violence be weighed against those recorded for the Five girl, Styx. A smudge emerged on the paper, and he frowned at that, his pen, and the door for good measure.

"You know it's legal, these days, to call ahead," he began, as he stretched and rose from his place on the couch, figuring that only Marina would be so goddamned presumptuous, but in equal measure grateful to see her.

Except, as he opened the door, it was very much not Marina.

"Hey, handsome," Saxaul announced. "Long time no see, huh?"

He blinked, then blinked again, no response immediately coming to mind.

"We can talk out here if you want," the younger man suggested, smiling in a way that, if anyone else had done it, would have been entirely innocent.

Hero cleared his throat.

"Please, by all means, come in. I'm afraid I wasn't expecting company, or I would have made something for you to eat."

It was dinner time, wasn't it? Oh _good lord_. He sounded like an idiot.

"Aren't you just the sweetest?" Saxaul said, ignoring his discomfort with his own idiocy, closing the door behind them.

The lock clicked into place, and he felt his mouth go very dry as he moved to the living room to neaten up the coffee table, and more importantly, to conceal his notes.

"So, whatcha working on, Head Gamemaker Snow?" he interrupted, suggesting that Saxaul knew exactly what he'd been working on, which, frankly, he wouldn't put past him.

"I thought we were on closer terms than that," Hero parried, in a rare moment of 'having a coherent reply', offering Saxaul a place on the couch.

"Hm, I'd have thought you'd be into the title."

"Not especially."

"And yet," Saxaul said, a note of cold steel behind his playful affect. "You did accept it, didn't you."

"I won't insult you by repeating Marina's spiel," he sighed. "She convinced me. There wasn't an alternative. You're familiar with the economic considerations -"

"Fuck the economy," Saxaul sighed, picking up the bottle from the coffee table, surely catching a look at the documents from District 7, and inspecting the label. "That might as well be my campaign slogan. Ooh, new stuff. How's the District Twelve project going?"

The way that it was going, technically, was top secret. A few preliminary investors Marina had roped into experimental vineyards in the wreckage of a smouldering crater. Population something to the effect of two hundred Capitol-born workers shipped in and out at the end of growing season. But of course, Saxaul would know about it.

He had a way of knowing things.

"Not my purview," he admitted. "But well enough to have a product, clearly. Ah, speaking of your campaign-"

"Terribly boring," Saxaul interrupted, uncapping the screwtop bottle and taking a long drink directly from it, pausing with an approving smile. "Do I detect a hint of… grapes?"

Despite himself, he laughed.

Just slightly.

Enough for Saxaul to notice, so... too much.

Fuck.

"Hey, are you seriously lounging around your own house in a three-piece suit?" he laughed, easily channeling the slight shift in energy. "You trying to worry me, or what?"

"What?" Hero asked, fully disarmed by the question. "Why -"

"Cora mentioned that you've been stressed lately. I mean, more than usual, which is already substantially more than a human should reasonably be able to endure. It's why I came over. Marina's worried enough about you to tell _Cora_ about it, and, I mean, Cora will tell anyone anything if they ask nicely enough, so I figured it must be serious."

Several things about that sentence didn't make much sense, but the regrettable truth was, sleeping an average of four hours a night and two glasses of wine in, he wasn't sure if that was a disconnect on Saxaul's end or his own.

"I… can't say I know what you're talking about," he finally answered, stiffly.

Saxaul had the utter nerve to laugh softly in response, pausing to take another long and careless drink from the bottle, leaving his lips red with wine.

_That_ was absolutely not going to help with _anything_.

"So, with the understanding that I'm quite well," Hero began, holding his own half-full glass of wine to steel himself, "I'll thank you for the visit."

"It's such a shame to drink alone," Saxaul noted, adopting a tone almost mockingly similar to Hero's. "It would hardly be appropriate to - sorry, I don't know how you can talk like that all the time, you sound ridiculous."

"Fascinating."

"Come off it, Hero, you know why I'm here. You're at least as smart as Marina."

"No one is as smart as Marina," he objected, shifting an inch back on the couch as Saxaul leaned an inch forward.

God damn it.

He smelled like sandalwood and wine.

This was not even remotely how Hero had imagined this going - not that he'd _imagined _it, fuck - but it was also, well, phenomenally difficult to do anything but what he was utterly certain Saxaul expected he would do.

"The loyalty you got going on is impressive," he noted with a grin. "As is a lot of your deal, Hero. You're not in an easy place, are you?"

"You have no fucking idea," Hero replied through gritted teeth.

"I could make some educated guesses," Saxaul offered.

"What do you want?"

"You know what I want." He paused, which dragged out altogether too long, then reached out slowly to take the end of Hero's tie.

This wasn't even remotely fair. The full-windsor of his tie pressed against his throat as Saxaul's grip tightened, and he was struck abruptly with the memory that this man had killed no fewer than four people in his Games. He had watched. He had seen every second of it.

"I would prefer it if you didn't kill me," he protested weakly, though he couldn't really bring himself to raise a hand in his own defense, his heart beating, it felt, in his face.

"Christ, you are the most _oblivious _motherfucker I've ever met, and I live with _Cora_," Saxaul sighed. "You sober enough to tell me to stop?"

"Certainly," he said, a little confused, and then abruptly not thinking about confusion or anything else as Saxaul rolled the fabric of his tie around his fist and pulled him into a rough kiss that tasted very much of wine and, fine, okay, he had thought about it, but - "Stop."

To his credit, Saxaul released his grip on his tie immediately and put a solid two feet of space between them unhesitantly.

He groaned, putting his head in his hands, coughing a little as the blood returned to his head. From his vantage point on the couch, he could still see the profiles he'd been poring over earlier, and he couldn't… he just couldn't...

"Fuck me."

"Well, I was getting there," Saxaul said good-naturedly. "And I do take constructive criticism as to _how_, if that's the issue here."

"No," he sighed, raking a hand through his hair, finding it in complete disarray. "I - Saxaul, I swear on anything, I... really… think highly of you in many regards, and it's my worry that this may take on a transactional… well, a power dynamic that I don't… and you don't deserve that, and I can't… do that to myself, either, and I'm. Ah. I'm very sorry."

"And here I was," Saxaul sighed, "thinking you didn't have a moral backbone."

"I do seem to have acquired one of those at some point."

"Not enough to stop her, though."

"She doesn't need to be stopped. I… I value your perspective, you know. If you want me to take your thoughts into consideration, you truly just need to… talk to me, occasionally. This is wholly unnecessary."

"Gross, _feelings_," Saxaul complained.

"I'm inclined to agree with you on that one." He hesitated. "Do you have thoughts on the District Seven nominations, then?"

Saxaul shrugged, rolling over, taking the papers, and leafing through them languorously.

"Can't say I do. You're on the money with these two. Janina's no Fidan, but she's a good kid, and good kids… well. Alder's a first-tier bastard, but District Seven had a hand in creating him and they deserve to see what they've done, there, that'll be… interesting. And that's exactly what you want. You've done well. That's what Marina will tell you when she sees your notes."

"District Four, then?"

"What do I know about trainees?"

"You killed one, you live with another, it's difficult to deny your qualifications."

He laughed harshly, setting down the bottle.

"Maybe so. I'll know more once I've met the children you and Marina plan to slaughter to appease the Capitol common-man deity and, one sure as fuck hopes, bring an end to things."

"One does hope," Hero agreed.

"Hope isn't enough. Or I wouldn't be running for fucking Parliament. Or I wouldn't be… here."

In a single gulp, Hero emptied his glass of wine, setting it down on his coffee table with, perhaps, some evidence of frustration.

"I want the same world that you want, Saxaul, and it's the world that Marina wants, as well."

A world where this evening would have gone very differently, for one, though he felt no particular need to voice that around.

"God, you are the most incorruptible piece of shit in all regards but the one that would have actually mattered," Saxaul said grudgingly. "Drink with me, at least?"

"That was the plan."

"You and Marina and - you know what, Manari, too. All of you with your goddamned plans."

"Cheers."

"Cheers," he agreed. "Happy Hunger Games, Head Gamemaker Snow."

x

_Fourteen down, ten to go. Luckily, everyone in the Capitol is miserable too._


	12. There's No Plan (or, District 8)

There's No Plan (Or, District 8)

x

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;  
I lift my lids and all is born again.  
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

'Mad Girl's Love Song', Sylvia Plath

x

Songket Khan, District 8

We live in a grey and cloistered factory district. That's kind of the deal with Eight, what anyone would understand after spending so much as a few minutes here. Our architecture is inextricable from our identity. The uniform warehouses and brick-lined factory buildings, the too-narrow streets, the empty crows' nests that used to hold Peacekeepers 24/7 to keep people from getting too out of line. Now they're just kind of a monument to a time before, but a time that my dad has told me about at length.

Most of it isn't physically Rebellion-scarred anymore, at least not obviously.

The quiet during work days, though, is totally ominous. Just the sound of our pull-carts and me and Lotta's footsteps interrupts the thrum of factory noise muted by thick walls, nothing green or soft to keep them from bouncing off walls indefinitely as we drag the piles of posters out to the squares that connect the factories, which will actually be populated by workers in a few hours when the factories let out for the hour-long break that the Capitol put in place.

Lotta's breathing is getting progressively heavier and iffy-sounding, so I brake the cart and cross my arms.

"Come on," I remind her. "Pull it together, this is important."

"Sorry," she murmurs, looking up at me with her disarmingly large brown eyes. "Just… so heavy."

She's a good one, Lotta, really dedicated, doesn't flinch away from hard work, most of the time. I'm going to save the world for people like her, people who know how to follow when it's called for, as it is, now. Who know how to take what's true on faith.

"It'll be lighter once we put some of these up," I suggest, nodding towards the massive piles of posters in each of our carts.

Her parents have a printing studio of sorts, are responsible for most of the printed materials in the district, and they'd do anything for their little girl, since Lotta's been all sick and listless for the last few months, only really interested in the last important mission remaining to us: warning the district of what's coming if we don't come together and stop it. She's actually got some kind of disease or syndrome or something, though I'm not totally sure what. Either way, her folks, despite their weepiness about the whole deal, are willing to put their money where their mouths are and help her, and by extension, me.

The posters are my work. They're a little wordy, I guess, but they have to be to explain everything that's going on in the Capitol, that's been going on for years without us knowing. Not just the secret experiments to create humans out of animals and invent super-viruses as weapons, which everyone pretty much knows about or at very least suspects. There's something coming, and it has everything to do with the lack of Peacekeepers pointing guns at us these days, the seeming concessions with labor rights and all that stuff.

I've watched the news, I know what's happening. My dad taught me to ask questions about the kind of stuff we're spoon-fed. So if they're treating us so good now, what do they know that we don't?

Here's what's going on: they haven't been doing the Hunger Games for the last few years on account of the new weapons they've been coming up with, not just to control our minds, which they've already been doing for a long time, but to use the genetic information they collected before, at every reaping, to target us all and end humanity and replace us all with machines.

They want us to believe that the digging and the rebuilding that's been going on is so we'll have internet access and stuff, but anyone can tell that installing that kind of thing wouldn't take nearly so long, and my dad still talks about the time he saw one of those workers acting shifty, and even overheard some weird stuff that he didn't understand.

People aren't reading the right stuff and listening to the right programs and asking the right questions, is all.

I'm pretty sure the posters will make that clear enough to start a conversation, y'know? And even if I get sniped for it or whatever, which I probably will… for a long time, this has been all I've cared about. Even more than my dad does, really, once I've gotten my momentum going. And people like Lotta, and some before, are with me.

And they won't think I'm crazy once I get killed for it.

A good revolution needs a martyr, and if I can get enough stuff done before then… well. I'll need to get these posters up before I deal with that.

"Come on," I repeat, picking up the handle of my pull-cart and forging ahead as Lotta does the same, trailing behind.

Once we reach live space, the part of this particular square that people actually inhabit, where it's worth putting up posters and actually has a shot at garnering the kind of attention we need to get the ball rolling, put together some sort of solution to the unignorable threat looming over all of us, Lotta is pale and sweaty and wheezing.

"You don't look so good," I observe, taking the first bottle of adhesive from the bag over my shoulder and preparing the first poster, which is always the most exciting part, going from a bare wall to a statement, piece by piece.

"Don't… feel… great," she says, but she takes out her own adhesive and gets to work, plastering a second poster next to mine in short order.

"Have you been meditating?" I suggest. "My dad says if you elevate your energy you won't get sick as much."

"Does it work on leukemia?"

I shrug.

"Can't _hurt_, can it? Your energy _has _been seeming muted, lately."

"Oh. Sorry," she says, as we work our way down the wall, pausing to plaster streetlamps and telephone poles as well, just to cover all of our bases.

It would be easier with a bigger crew, of course, but things have been slowing down, lately. Right in the aftermath of the hiatus, I was able to get a lot of traction, get a lot of people in, since no one could deny that weird stuff was happening, that things seemed not-right. That was right around the time that a ton of weird infrastructure stuff started up, and my dad's radios, he says, picked up some weird transmissions about like… pods, and DNA, and blowing stuff up, which just put shape to everything he'd always been saying about doomsday.

Horrible though it was, learning that we would have to shoulder the truth ourselves, the obligation of being the only people who really understood what was happening, I've always known that I was destined for this kind of thing, to be the person who saved the district and the country.

My dad said so. My mom died when she was having me, and it was hard for him, until he realized what an amazing destiny I had. I never cried as a baby, didn't sleep or fuss, and it was his saving grace as a single father, to hear him tell about it. He realized a lot of things in the months after my mom died, about what the government is really all about, even after the Rebellion, with Reconstruction and all going on. He saw what nobody else saw, and so do I, now.

For a while, a lot of people saw it, too. Not just Lotta, who's all attachment-y and has always been a bit of a weird kid, but people like Satin and her boyfriend Bolton for a while, who started showing up to meetings, and Batting and Chevy and a whole group of other people who were like, in it, really in it.

I'm not sure when it all fell apart, but I figure someone got too mouthy about what we were doing in earshot of their parents, and not everyone is as cool as my dad. In fact, most of my friend's parents have been weird about letting them come over to my place pretty much ever, like they're scared of him.

People are always scared of the truth.

And now it's up to just me and Lotta to tell it, and I'll take what I can get, because no matter what anyone says, this is important, this is stuff people need to hear, and I'm the only one who can tell it to them.

I hit the corner of the first building and stop. Lotta looks exhausted already.

"I wish everyone else hadn't abandoned us," I tell her, sympathetically. "You shouldn't have to shoulder so much of the burden of this work, but you're the only person left with any faith."

Despite her bedraggled appearance, she still manages to look up and smile.

"Really, Songket?"

"Really. You're the best of them," I say, putting my hand on her shoulder, briefly. "Now come on. We've got another hour, and we need to share our message."

She nods fervently, and we get back to work.

My stomach growls. I've been fixating on this project all morning, trying to plan everything out, making sure that we have enough adhesive and all. My dad says that's the sign of what I am, someone put here to save us all, how I get weirdly deep-focused sometimes and can't pull out of it. Overall, it's not so bad when it's something useful like homework or a project like this to rescue Panem from the genocide the Capitol is definitely planning, with _light_, they're going to kill us all with light… but it can be miserable when it's something dumb, like fixating on old pictures of my mom for way too long and ignoring anything else I'm supposed to be doing.

And even though we've never really gone without food, since my dad's a real shopkeeper and keeps everything together well enough these days, I forget to eat sometimes, like I have this morning.

It's just another trial to press through to prove the worthiness of our cause, though. Like so many others.

We work diligently until the work is done, and our pull-carts are substantially lighter. At this point, Lotta and I are extremely efficient. This makes the ninth labor-sector square that we've plastered. Plus, we've gotten more strategic in our placement, so this means we have enough leftover to get from 5B to 6A after their lunch hour is over, though not necessarily enough time or energy to make it all the way home and back.

Once we've found a suitable place to stop and rest, we wait in the shade as the square behind us becomes a hive of sound and activity, shouting people and jostling crowds.

I think it seems right to prompt Lotta to talk about whatever her deal has been lately, and she spills for a while about blood tests and cells and bones, mostly stuff that I'm not interested in.

"You know," I interrupt as she mentions some kind of procedure her parents are paying through the nose for, "they're using that bone marrow or whatever to calibrate the pods they'll use to vaporize us, if they get away with it."

My interjection was more word-association than anything, but her face falls, regardless.

"I'm sorry," she says. "Do you think I could ask them to get rid of it? I got new marrow, I said, just from my dad, though…"

"Lotta," I warn her gravely. "You have to be careful. Your dad is already under their influence, you've heard how he talks about this stuff, right?"

"I just thought it was better than…"

"Be careful, that's all. Let me see your eyes."

I take her by the chin and tilt her face until I can see her pupils, narrow and tensed, even in the shadow of the alley. The observation makes me frown.

"I'll have to keep closer track of how you're behaving," I announce. "In case you're under influence, now."

"No!" she insists. "I'm not, I promise, Songket, I totally promise, I'm just…"

"The treatments aren't even working, are they?"

"They… said they might take a little while."

"I don't know if you should be doing that to yourself. It's a waste of resources, after all, if we're all just going to die without your contributions."

That's stretching it a little. Lotta's not vital to this operation, though she is kind of the only person other than my dad who's actually got my back on this. I don't want her getting all muddled with someone else's thoughts, since I usually like her thoughts, since they're usually the same as my thoughts.

"Well… maybe…"

"Just think about it," I direct her. "Maybe a good subject for meditation, huh?"

"Yeah," she agrees, looking down at her bony limbs with a sort of tragic sadness, like she's fully aware of the terrible fate awaiting all of us if we fail to truly raise the alarm about what's happening underground, under our very noses.

We carry on for hours more, until the pull-carts are completely empty. At this point, we're well into the factory sector, as far away from the Justice Building and the part of the district where we live and go to school as I think either of us has ever been.

Lotta is looking truly terrible, so I have her sit in the pull cart and drag her along for as long as I can. I'm starting to feel shaky from the heat and from missing all of my meals today, but the thing about righteous suffering, which is what this is, is that it strengthens not just my own resolve, but that of my allies.

Like Lotta, and my dad.

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing until your hands crack and bleed and your knees shake. It's worth doing it until you're dead in the dirt. That's how my dad explained my mom dying in the process of having me. She knew from the beginning that she didn't necessarily have the strength to get through it, since she'd always been pretty delicate, from the pictures, and her own mom had died having her.

But she knew it was worth it, to bring me into the world, and she held onto that, even when her family begged her not to do it. There are ways to avoid having babies, even in District 8. Especially in District 8, since there are so many people still living miserable lives, no matter what kind of promises the Capitol makes about that. The sort of lives you wouldn't want to share with a baby.

It's sad to know how I'll never do any of those things, never fall in love, never have a child of my own. But I've always known that, ever since I could know things, because my dad has known that. There's nothing like that waiting for me or anyone else, not Lotta and not any of the kids from school who abandoned the cause when they thought everything was going well enough without it…

Not with the terrible things looming, lurking beneath the streets of Panem.

A Two-born Peacekeeper, my dad says, once flashed him schematics for re-built pods, and he's heard whispers from others of them. It figures that no one from the outer districts would know. It's pure luck, after all, that he and I understand the threat we're all facing.

We have to pause, halfway home, for Lotta to vomit up bile into a trashcan. She's sweating like crazy even though she's not the one pulling the cart, and I don't think either of us have been, well, taking care of ourselves very well.

Pulling the two pull carts at once, even with one empty, is getting progressively more challenging, and my arms ache, but I don't complain.

At least we're making good progress in getting home, or we are until I laboriously navigate the pull carts around a corner and find myself face to face with a pair of tired-looking Peacekeepers, their white uniforms coated in dust to the extent that they're unrecognizable at first.

I stop full in my tracks, not recognizing either of them, and Lotta nearly falls out of the cart.

"What is it _now_?" one of them, an unhelmeted woman, says, her voice heavy with exhaustion, adding as an afterthought, "and stop where you are, we'll need to see some identification for the both of you."

"It doesn't look like they've been involved in the riot, Vibenna," the other Peacekeeper says, removing her helmet to reveal the dark hair and eyes that often indicate a Two-born member of the force, which is a relief.

From what my dad says, they tend to be sympathetic to our cause. 'Vibenna' is also a very Two name, or a Capitol name, so that's sort of fifty-fifty.

Either way, I take out my ID card and gesture for Lotta to give me hers as well.

Luckily, it's too late in the day to ask why either of us aren't in school. That's a small relief.

"Ah," the first Peacekeeper, Vibenna, says upon looking at my card. "The Khan girl. I understand it's you we have to thank for the art installation in the factory squares?"

I stand to my full height, which is not especially substantial, and try to convey the gravitas of my work through my tone as I respond. I would never lie about something so important, not even if it gets us in trouble. People have to know the truth, and Peacekeepers will die just as easy as the rest of us if the Capitol gets a mind to wipe us out and be done with us.

"Yes," I say clearly. "Me and Lotta. We have to warn people. It's only right."

The second Peacekeeper sighs.

"She's Tjanting's kid," she tells Vibenna. "You know, the…"

"Ah."

"They're harmless."

I'm hardly harmless, I like to think. Information is its own kind of expression of power, but I know as well as anyone that someday I'm going to have to go out in a blaze of glory, either brought on by the Capitol's pods or just… raising the alarm in a way that no one can ignore. I have ideas about that, of course, ways that I could gain a real platform, not just the postered walls of the factories and the mild pity of the Peacekeepers.

A lot of ideas.

A while back, my dad somehow got ahold of a Peacekeeper's rifle. Not loaded or anything, not really usable, but I've been practicing with it, just thinking about how someday, if it really came down to it, I'd want to know how to take the safety off, point and shoot, know the weight of it.

Both of these Peacekeepers are armed. I have a very good idea of how long it would take me to lift the rifle off either of their hips. And they wouldn't expect it, either, because I look the way I do, because they think me and my dad are… harmless, and we are, to a point.

The Capitol has made the first move, though, and eventually we're going to have to retaliate beyond poster campaigns.

Not even Lotta knows that, but I do.

"Run along, you two," the first Peacekeeper directs us, handing back our IDs. "You may have missed the announcement, but there was a riot in this area, and citizens are directed to remain indoors."

"We understand," Lotta says weakly, and I nod along with her.

With that, we're free to go, and while my arms ache worse than before, after pausing to really feel them, I'm grateful to have made it out of that confrontation so easily.

"You're not harmless," Lotta adds as I pull her in the direction of home. "That's not true, Songket. If people could just hear you, if they understood… you would bring us all together and save the world. I know that. If people could just _wake up_…"

How, though, is the question?

The only thing that District 8 seems to understand is misery and subjugation, since they so easily return to it, given half an opportunity. My dad, until me, was the only one willing to stand against it, and they tried to grind him down into obedience, tried to silence him, have called him crazy…

I hate it when people call me crazy. There's nothing I hate more.

"This was a good start," I tell Lotta. "We did well today. But you're right. I need to do something bigger, before it's too late."

Something, but _what_?

x

Cambric Forsyth, District 8

"Who the fuck is plastering these fucking things everywhere?" Chenille complains, whipping out one of her collection of pocketknives and scraping at the corner of yet another poster promising our collective doom at the hands of… it's not totally clear from whence the doom is supposed to spring, but the doom itself is central and unignorable.

It wouldn't be a problem if it weren't so visually distracting, and, I guess, potentially an issue for our assembly, which relies on the structural integrity of these posts.

We don't have a lot of time to get our impromptu stage set up in the factory district square. Specifically, square 5A, between a quartet of unremarkable warehouses humming with the sound of machinery within. It's a drab sort of place, and we stick out like a rhinestone button on a homemade sweater with our carefully constructed fold-out stage and carefully balanced rigged-up curtain.

At least, the curtain would be all assembled, if it weren't for the goddamned posters making it impossible to balance it properly on the lamppost.

"You know who," I sigh, though there's a chance Chenille doesn't, since she's three years my senior and hasn't been in school for longer than I have.

Songket, the girl in question, never attended my actual school, but I heard enough stories through the grapevine to know she's the only one who could be responsible for this kind of thing at this scale.

"Yeah, yeah, but I mean, is the bitch made of money or something?" Chenille gripes, finally prying one meticulously glued poster from the lamppost, getting to work on another as I prep one of our larger stage tricks for use, making sure the device to mimic a breathing form in the pull-away box is functioning and nothing's been damaged in transport.

It's a great trick, so long as the boxes move smoothly. Three plywood cubes, one atop another, with a series of cut-aways that allow an audience to see and track the presence of a person in the box. Push one to the side, all the way, and you have the illusion of a person cut into thirds, easy enough to achieve for a scrawny kid who can compress their abdomen in the two or three inches of space leftover, stick a foot out one box, press a 'breathing' panel with a spare hand, and demonstrate the other hand and their animated face in the 'head box'.

All seems well. This done, I head over to help her strip the posters and get the curtain up.

"She's running a better con than we are with this shit," I comment, taking a moment to actually look over one of the posters as I slice it to ribbons with a razor blade in the process of dislodging it from the pole.

"What, you don't think the Capitol's gonna blow us all up with…" Chenille pauses, squinting at the small print on the densely-worded paper. "Secret reserves of our genetic material used to train lasers to target each of us at a cellular level?"

"Oh!" I snap my fingers, grinning over the plywood set piece as we hoist it up, Chenille doing most of the actual work since I'm one-handing it. "We could build a show around it! You know, that'd be a great bit, the idea that some kind of… you know, someone disappears based on predetermined… you're following me, right? It's a great expectation to play on, and everyone already knows the bit. I'll be the psycho Capitol scientist, you be the innocent district girl. And it'd be a great moment to break out the pyrotechnics."

"You're not gonna be happy until you've set us both on fire," she grumbles.

"I'm telling you, that crazy Songket chick would do half our publicity for us."

"Maybe let's finish up with the actual show prep, first, before the Peacekeepers come through and start asking about permits, huh?"

It's delicate timing, getting the whole works up and functioning before whichever factory we're staking out releases its workers for lunch, during the mid-day break to allow the machines to cool and the smaller shift of cleanup workers to sweep through and run safety checks. I know a little more about the whole thing than I'd care to, since it's kind of unavoidable if you stay in school too long, or if you don't, really, since the main alternative involves working a loom line in one of the same dingy warehouses that surround us as we hang drapes and finish bolstering the makeshift stage.

At the same time, Chenille is right about our entirely illegitimate operation being excellent Peacekeeper fodder, and therein lies the delicacy of the game we're playing.

Not exactly the straight-and-narrow or the well-traveled road to survival in Eight, but it's me and my sister, and it used to be her and me and my dad, and that's… well. That's what makes everything worth doing in the first place, right? Good people to go home to, full pockets, full stomachs, regardless of what we did to get there.

This part is mostly legit, if you don't count the fact that we absolutely didn't apply for the rights to perform here. The only entity we're pulling a fast one on in this context is the office of the mayor. It's more questionable when it's just normal people, the even-less-legal stuff, the kind of things we could get in real trouble over.

Just about in time, hustling, now, since de-postering the lampposts serving as impromptu balances to hold up several of the set pieces took more time than we typically budget, Chenille and I finish setting up the stage.

She grimaces, wiping the sheen of sweat from her pale brow with the sleeve of her performance shirt as the lunch bell rings simultaneously in four different factories, a noise that would be loud in its own but becomes positively cacophonous when echoed through the empty streets.

"How do I look?" she asks over the din, taking her hip-length red hair down, tossing it back, and then tying it into a fresh ponytail, which she slips under a moderately ratty bleached blonde wig.

"Little less ugly than usual, but there's no doing anything about your face," I say helpfully.

"Shut your mouth, Cam, dad should've left your scrawny ass with the midwife. Swear to god you get uglier every year."

"Mostly on account of spending so much time with you, I'd say. Dad's so handsome. What on earth happened to us?"

This is a sort of tradition we have, talking shit before we do a show. Dad would never stand for it, if he was able to stand for much of anything lately. Big on the 'positive attitude, be nice to your sister' thing, and the same deal with Chenille, though not quite so emphatic, since she doesn't fight if I don't poke at her. She's just a better person than I am - no harm in admitting it.

What he doesn't really get is that the two of us performing is a hugely different deal than him and an assistant. We're visibly a couple of kids, after all, even if neither of us is any kind of wilting violet of a person. Most of our audience, and most of the people we end up pickpocketing if they don't leave tips, like decent humans, is older than us, and right in thinking they could smash our skulls in if it came to a fight. This is a vulnerable position, and 'positive attitudes' or not, there's no way to project the kind of authority and gravitas a big middle-aged guy like him, experienced, grizzled with age, clearly commanding and in charge, could summon up with a snap of his fingers. Not a for scrawny seventeen year old boy and his equally scrawny older sister, who was just out of school herself when she started.

It was even worse, I know, though Chenille won't talk about it, when she tried to go at it all on her own for the first few weeks after dad got sick. She came home shaky and bruised and walking funny a few too many times, no recourse I could take, nothing I could do.

Well, _something_ I could do.

I dropped out of school and started up as her partner, and now it's what we do, and it works, god damn it, it _works_, even if we can't get by playing by the same rulebook that dad used in his day.

So we pump each other up for the kind of hoots and shouts and heckles we sometimes get, and when it happens, we brush it off, keep smiling, and do our damned best to rob the person in question blind when the time comes.

I seem to have won this round with my retort. Workers begin to spill out onto the streets, effectively cutting off her reply. Knowing anything she says will be near inaudible in the immediate rush of activity, she opts to flip me off with a rueful smile, and I cheerfully reciprocate.

We cycle through locations on a fairly long loop, to avoid stepping on too many toes, and switch out roles as well, to keep things spicy for the crowds.

"Show time," Chenille mouths as I turn to the milling throng of people.

"People of District Eight!" I shout, even at top volume still inaudible to any but the nearest people in the crowd. "Good people of District Eight! Straight from the Capitol, a guest to entertain you!"

I set down our tip box near the front of the stage, close enough to square up with anyone who gets ideas before they can run off with it, though it's not usually an issue.

As usual, as things begin to calm down, a proper audience accumulates, tired-looking workers looking on mild interest, bag lunches purchased at factory canteens on their laps or in their hands. Chenille has fully taken on her character - a caricature of the District 8 escort, a woman named Alexas - and is waving and half-smiling with an air of haughty disinterest.

With some relief, I note a few people tossing their spare change into our tip box already, just with her hamming it up onstage as I pull in a few stragglers with promises of magic and intrigue.

Chenille is great with character work and stage presentation, though I tend to have her beat with sleight of hand. As I corral the crowd, my exaggerated patchwork coat fluttering behind me, I make easy pickings of change half-out of pockets and bags. Most of the crowd to the back won't bother dropping a credit in our box, so I don't think more than a second or two on the choice. It's old hat at this point.

"Welcome, welcome!" Chenille calls in an affected Capitol accent. Alexas is a very easy target - recognizable by the mess of near-white hair and greenish skin, easily mimicked with cheap stage makeup, and none of the people in this crowd would spit on our escort if she were on fire, so there's little chance of going too far. "Haven't you all missed me these last few years?"

Scattered laughs and boos already.

"Heathens!" she chides the crowd shrilly, waving her arms in a meticulously careful but seemingly casual gesture that releases a torrent of paper slips from each of her sleeves. "Ah, no, don't look at those - we're supposed to have a volunteer!"

"I volunteer!" I shout from the back of the crowd.

"A volunteer!" she feigns shock, casually sweeping together a small pile of the slips of paper for me with the toe of her shoe in advance of my part of the act.

"Yes, ma'am!"

I saunter to the stage, warmed by the sense of being watched, even in my over-exaggeratedly patchwork costume, dust smeared artistically on my face.

"And what would your name be, young man?"

"Batik Trainor, at your service!"

This is, of course, not my name. We're not stupid enough to make our legal names public knowledge. Not when my coat is already heavy with lifted credits from the less generous-looking members of the crowd.

I lean down to scoop up the handful of paper slips she's created, open a hidden button in my coat with a flick of my wrist, and release one of our remarkably well-behaved doves - this one named Saffron - from my sleeve. As the shower of paper slips falls anew, I release Basil after her.

"Oh dear," Chenille says, in exaggerated dismay. "They're not supposed to do that."

This gets a laugh, particularly as I flare my coattails and set two more doves free, these, Paprika and Anise, trained to land gently in her wig, though you wouldn't know that by the way she shrieks and tries to get them off. Now I'm bird-less and capable of fitting in the box, but our bit isn't quite done.

"You monsters!" my sister is insisting, her wig askew, the doves all waiting with well-mannered precision on the support cable holding up the set. "You're not fit for our beautiful Games!"

What's supposed to happen next is a sequence we've practiced a great many times, to vast success. I set the remainder of the slips of flash paper on fire, and tell Chenille-as-Alexas that all District 8 citizens possess powerful magic, accentuating this claim with some careful scarf-work. Everyone loves scarf-work, it's our industry and we're right to be proud about it.

All according to plan.

Then I insist on further proving my claim. I lead her to the box, and tell her that there's a trick to our collective ability to die with _style_. Which isn't exactly true, but there are two reasons someone will believe a lie, and the best one is a personal investment in it being true.

We all want to believe something like that, since it's less depressing than the alternative.

The other driver of a successful lie is personal investment in its being _untrue_, of course.

I make it into the box, and Chenille presses the center box of the three stacked one-atop-another until my abdomen is pressed into a space of two or three inches, which, thanks to the painstaking optical illusions painted onto the plywood frame, appears to be a totally negligible amount of room. One of my arms extends into the pressed-to-the-side box, and the other hangs languorously from an opening next to my head, as though this is the easiest thing I've ever done.

By all appearances, there is a massive empty space between my shoulders and my waist, and the rest of my body has been shifted two feet to the right.

Ideally, we would proceed to bring up a good mark from the audience, who would put their hand on the 'stomach' panel and feel me pressing on it, revealing to the crowd that I was authentically breathing-and-existing in the pulled-to-the-side box, would touch my hand and my face and put their hand in the empty space to verify the non-involvement of mirrors.

Then, I would usher Chenille into the box herself with promises that my magic would protect her and then shove the box across with feigned roughness, and she would crush a bodice full of fake blood pellets and fall out of the box, dead. At this point, the lunch break would be rolling to an end, so I would do my bows, make a few more jokes and do more fabric tricks, her increasingly bloodied body becoming funnier with every second I ignore it. People filing by to get a closer look at both her and the box would leave tips, and once they were called back into work, we would pack up the set quickly and cart it away, no one the wiser.

That isn't what happens this time.

My dad's warnings to me and Chenille, from birth, practically, most often on the days that even he would end up fucked over by an angry crowd, was that people hate to be made to feel ignorant, and when a magician makes his audience feel stupid, they'll do anything in their power to punish him for it.

(Him _or her_, Chenille likes to remind him now, when he's feeling up to these sorts of lectures.)

A crowd will punish a magician who pulls too many fast ones on them, which is why duo acts work so well. The patsy isn't the crowd, it's Chenille in a bad wig or me pretending to be a Capitol businessman or, on occasion, insisting I'm Mayor Lopez's son.

Sometimes individuals take things so personally that even the power of a good duo dynamic can't assuage their desire to outsmart the smart guy (or girl! Sorry, Chenille!) onstage, and that's when volunteers get dangerous. There's no perfect formula to pick a good one, but both of us have pretty strong track records.

So I'm loaded into the box, and Chenille ushers up a short young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, who looks a bit worn out, like she might be pregnant or recently so, based on the curve of her stomach. Mothers are often a good bet, though it's hard to guess who's what with only their appearance at work, in the factory uniforms, as a guide.

As Chenille leads her up to me, engaging in her typical patter about how she needs someone with better eyes, someone who can see through this basal district-level trickery, I catch an expression that I don't really like as the woman meets my eyes.

It's not delight or curiosity.

It's vindictive anger.

And there's nothing I can do, since I can barely so much as speak, squinched in the stacked crates, until she rips through the fabric panel meant as a facsimile for my shirt, grabs me by the hand, and twists my pale wrist out of the box.

Any wind I had left in me is fully knocked out as she wrenches powerfully at the plywood box, splinters it as the crowd gasps.

I don't recognize her. Chenille is gaping as well, though I can see the gears in her head turning towards damage control, as I stumble out of the shattered box, feeling as though I might have a broken rib or two.

"You really want to cheer for a couple of fucking thieves?" the woman is demanding of the crowd, and she reaches down to grasp the hem of my jacket, shaking at it until the credits I've lifted spill free.

Which wouldn't be an issue if the whole situation hadn't riled everyone the whole way up, if the crowd wasn't already mostly done with their lunches and ready for more action, if the woman didn't throw the first punch and clock me full in the face, raising her fist to do it again as onlookers begin to approach the stage.

"Cambric!" Chenille cries, breaking character immediately to run to my side, whipping out her knife and slashing the woman across the face, pushing her, bleeding, into the crowd to hold them off.

"Get the curtains!" I insist, over the sound of my own wheezing breaths and the noise of the approaching crowd.

They're the most costly part, the most difficult to replace.

As Chenille tears them down, kicking and menacing away the first wave of angered audience-members, I scoop up everything in the tip box and sprint for the doves, still resting with a near-sedated sense of calm on the wire holding everything together.

They all fit in my coat, of course, and are accustomed to the experience.

We make our getaway as best we can. I go to salvage the cables, as well, but a chunk of loose pavement hits me hard in the side, jarring enough after my violent exit from the box to make me think it's drawn blood, to double me over.

Chenille half-hoists me on her shoulder, and we flat-out run, to the extent that I can. I'd say we know these routes better than any of the workers, and they'll have to return to their posts soon, so we really just have to keep up the pace until we get out of this particular square and get ourselves onto the alley route home.

Easier said than done.

A paving stone catches Chenille over her eye, and she damn near goes down. Soon enough, we're leaning on each other, neither of us really equipped to act as main support, especially once someone throws a literal fork at me, hard, and actually gets me in the back of the neck, hard enough to slice the skin.

We do make it, though, as we have before, the white-line scars on both of our bodies evidence that this isn't always the easiest life. It happens, we deal with the fallout, we debrief, we get back at it. That's just how our family does things.

Though in the past, dad hasn't been so sick, and Chenille's had a part time job other than running gambits like this with me.

By the time we make it back to our house, a little four-room structure that barely fits all of us, both me and my sister are bleeding, out of breath, exhausted, just about ready to drop.

And we do - collapse, I mean, in the sort-of-living-room, sort-of-me-and-Chenille's-room. Out of dad's sight, thankfully, since he's been sleeping in his room most of the day since he got sick.

"Christ," she complains, after we've slightly caught our breath. "Just me, or was it worse this time?"

"People are on-edge," I suggest, though my tone is only slightly above a murmur, thanks to the stabbing pains in my chest.

"Could we have avoided that?" she asks, staring up at the peeling paint on the ceiling.

"Dunno, honestly," I say. "She looked like a good mark, right up until she didn't."

"Fuck."

"Fuck," I agree.

"Well," Chenille says, pulling herself to her feet, wiping the blood from her eyes and looking me up and down. "Sit tight, I'll grab some temporary bandages and we can check out your ribs, and then I'll check in on dad. You just try to breathe it out, huh?"

I drag myself into a sitting position, wincing as something stabs even more terribly in my chest, and pull open my coat to release my doves. We have a little hutch in the corner of the room, next to the couch where I sleep. They're all named for seasonings, and they're all particularly well-behaved females from back when my dad bought a few off a guy selling pigeons for food and started breeding them into proper training birds.

They're my spice girls!

Saffron nuzzles her way out of my left sleeve, Basil from my right. Anise flutters out of my left pocket with an indignant noise.

Paprika doesn't move.

My heart sinks.

It appears that not all of the blood staining my side from where the brick hit me is my own.

Oh.

I'm still staring at her feathery little body when Chenille comes out of the bathroom, holding a roll of bandages and some disinfectant, one wrapped around her own forehead already.

"Alright, Cam, let's sort this out," she announces, but stops when she sees what I'm looking at. "Oh, dude, shit, I'm so sorry, is she..?"

Not really able to find the words, which is a rare enough state for me, I just nod. My eyes feel wet with tears, but I'd have to put Paprika down to dry them.

"Hey," she says, putting an arm around my shoulders. "Hey, hey, stop, we'll…"

"We're going to have to _eat_ her," I whisper, which is the stupidest and most childish thing to get upset about, right now, when I still can't breathe properly and my sister's goddamned head wound is still oozing blood, but I just can't…

"No, we don't," she insists, nearly laughing, as though she didn't grit her teeth and pluck and roast the last dove that died, though that one just got mauled by a cat before we moved the hutch inside. "Let's check our haul before we start acting like there's anything we have to do, okay? Come on, Cam, we've had worse, lord knows _I've_ had worse, chin up, you're tougher than this, okay?"

That's just the thing, though.

We've had worse afternoons than this one. We're not as good at this as my dad was. We've been trying to make this work for a year now, helping him out for longer, but on our own… it's increasingly clear that this isn't sustainable. That I can't protect Chenille, and she can't protect me out there.

And the thing is, I'm less than useless to her in here. If she wasn't stuck caring for me and dad, if I could pull my shit together and figure out how she… whatever she's doing to take care of him, I don't even know! If I wasn't holding her back, Chenille could be anything. She's crazy smart, good at basically everything, did better in school than I did, even, before she had to…

Here I am, her dumb kid brother crying over a bird, better at playing at being someone I'm not and waving sparklers at crowds than anything actually useful.

"Aw, come here," she says, pulling me into a hug that actually makes me feel much worse, thank-you-very-much.

The other thing is this.

I'm no shut-in, but I watch enough television to know what you get when you volunteer. We joked about it, actually, how the best thing you could offer someone from District 8 was the chance to leave. A lump sum of cash, and a set of visas out of the district for the family of the volunteer. Anywhere else that'll take them.

Which includes places with real hospitals, and Chenille with enough money to put dad up in one, stop burning herself out doing it on her own, could actually _do_ something, anything…

I look down at the dead dove in my hands, and all I can see is something that trusted me, something that loved me, and something that, like so many things, I couldn't protect.

She's going to be so mad at me.

I smile at my sister, through my tears and through the pain of my rib, worse with every breath.

"I love you."

"I know, dumbass, stop crying," she says, holding me just a little tighter, careful to avoid my jacked-up ribcage. "Pull it together, act like yourself, come on."

"Okay."

I will.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol

Strangely enough, she found herself in Polly's studio office on a Friday afternoon, on her way back from a morning trip to District 8 to finalize their nominations in person, as Mayor Lopez had simply made the calls herself and announced that she could make her rulings at her own leisure. No real surprises, she felt, still with the weight of the folder in her shoulder-bag to remind her of the previous errand. Eventually the exposure to it, the two new faces in each folder, started to numb her.

Not a pleasant experience.

Also not what brought her to the… well, whatever it was, the space had the capacity to be well-lit, but was currently pitch dark, with blackout shades pulled over the massive windows, the principal light source a bright red laser humming on Polly's disorganized desk, scattering fragments of red light across a mess of papers, diagrams, and a single potted plant next to a variety of empty pill bottles.

Even with the protective glasses she'd accepted, it was bright, and she waited in silence for whatever was happening to be done. The project was time sensitive, of course, the sooner it could be completed, the better.

With a long sigh, Polly flicked the laser off the highest setting, turning the near-violent glow into a negligible bead of mostly-concealed red light beneath her microscope, and removed her thick protective goggles, snapping her fingers in the air to pull her shades up and illuminate the room.

In the sunlight, it was even messier, and contained Polly's small calico cat, Halogen, a demon in cat form, Marina speculated, which rarely left its mistress's side.

"Well?" she prompted. "Where are you on the project?"

It was an important piece of work. Pivotal, actually. Polly had let the metaphorical cat out of the bag when it came to the construction of the deadly array of modified pods beneath the Capitol, each capable of unfathomable destruction, and it couldn't easily be undone.

What she could do, with time and effort and resources, was design a material from which protective gear could be constructed, to defray the potential devastation, particularly the targeted genetic attacks that Polly had been very clear were possible. It didn't take a brilliant mind to think over who Claudia might want burned to ashes by a supercomputer suspended in pure light, after all.

"I'm testing the latest iteration under broad-spectrum visible wavelengths, though we'll be moving up in wavelength to vet under a wider scope of scenarios. The challenge, of course, is preserving the efficacy of the reflection technique without making the intention of the media explicit under scrutiny with the naked eye." Polly explained. "Are you… following this?"

"Hard to make it subtle but also work," Marina supplied, and Polly nodded approvingly.

"Yes. Alright, so at the moment I'm running trials on a polymer modeled on Peacekeeper uniforms, treated with various quartzite particle sizes, if you'd like to take a look," she said, offering her the microscope after flicking off a series of colored lasers that had been bathing the workspace in a moderately ominous red glow.

It looked more or less like the crystalline sand of the nicer beaches of District 4, even at such high magnification. Almost like finely-milled white glitter, really, though she understood that she was seeing the material at unfathomably close proximity.

"Wow," she said, and that was really all there was to say about it. "And it works?"

"So far, so good."

She'd have to get the ball rolling soon if she wanted to initiate any kind of mass production in District 8. It wasn't an ideal answer, but she didn't want to say that to Polly, either.

Shouldn't there be an easier solution? She wondered if she couldn't figure something out if she actually had any time or mental energy to expend on the problem, if everything wasn't so utterly agonizing all the goddamned time.

"That's good to hear. Anything else interesting in the works?" she asked conversationally, even though she hoped very much that the answer was 'no'.

"Of course not. You assigned this project singular priority," Polly said, actually looking up at her, almost meeting her eyes before looking away and frowning.

"Yes, I did."

"...then why would you ask?"

Polly looked sincerely curious, and far more concerned than she'd expected. It was easy to forget that Saxaul wasn't the only mentor who could be dangerously perceptive - under the right circumstances, at least, Polly's intelligence translated directly to blunt and sometimes very inconvenient observations of inconsistency in others' behavior.

"Just curious."

That was a lie.

She was lonely, and she didn't want to go home and be lonely _and _alone. Not with Hero being progressively weirder and cagier and more reluctant to talk about anything, which, damn it, she'd known that secrets were a mistake, she knew that it was better to communicate than not to communicate, but, well, too fucking late for that now! And he was more or less the only person she cared about who she had any expectations might not act like a _lunatic nightmare _with the Games drawing near, fair though the behavior was on the part of the people shouldering a sizable part of the burden of the impending suffering.

Cora had disappeared to Seven to visit the Otas, though for a much longer time than usual. Saxaul was Saxaul, and now he was running _campaign ads_, which was a little like watching a labradoodle sing an operatic composition. Manari hadn't been to the Capitol in nearly a year, and most of their correspondence was pure business, anyway, though her apartment was still tightly in accordance with accessibility metrics after their stint as roommates.

And that was really it. She'd never _talked_ to her team of volunteers outside of work and logistics back when she'd been Wiltshire's field organizer. She could hardly talk to the President, who barely took visitors these days. It was difficult enough to get her signature, let alone a conversation longer than a few tired sentences.

She wondered if Lancaster might not be lonely as well.

Not much she could do about that.

At least Polly's weirdness was predictable.

"It's just abnormal for you is all," Polly said, as if in response to her thought. "You usually remember exactly what you asked me to do better than you do pretty much anything else. It can be obnoxious."

"Ah, sorry," she said, a little awkwardly. "That's not intentional. I mean, the constant threat of genocide…"

"Always with the genocide," Polly sighed. "Live with the threat of genocide long enough and it loses some of the punch."

Polly, of course, had known about the pods longer than anyone, having effectively designed them herself. Under the supervision of Claudia and the helpful house-arrest previously enforced by Mayor Rhodes, of course, for all that mattered in the scheme of things. The pods were retrofitted, they could definitely kill, indiscriminately or deliberately, and Claudia was the person with her finger on the trigger.

"Suppose so," Marina agreed, somewhat reluctantly.

What a nightmare. She'd been really hoping for some nightmare-ending news, but it seemed like that was in short supply.

Likely she was doing a poorer job than usual of holding herself together, because Polly continued to glance up at her every few seconds, never quite meeting her eyes, bearing an expression of concern.

"Are things… is there something wrong?" she asked, after several moments of awkward silence.

"Nothing is any wronger than it's been lately."

"Oh," Polly said hesitantly. "I mean, that's not exceptionally reassuring, as far as comments go."

She sighed, wishing for an easy way to hide her face.

"You've made great progress. Please don't think I'm diminishing… I don't know. It's been a long day. I've come back from District Eight, and that's never… I wonder how anyone survives that place. You know, among their volunteering incentives, they included the relocation of the volunteer's family? I was only there an hour and _I_ wanted nothing more than to leave. How have things gotten so terrible?"

"_Oh_," Polly repeated.

Definitely not the person to be venting to, then.

But she couldn't entirely figure out how to stop.

"I have two more children in my bag," she added. "And I'm going to give their files to Hero, and he's going to grimace and say nothing and bow and disappear into his apartment. These children are going to die. It's pathetic how I keep realizing that. So many of them simply don't have a chance, volunteers or not, and that's how it has to be. That's how it's always been, and I can't change the script now. But it's so fucking miserable, and there's no one left I can talk to about it."

Polly blinked up at her, expression totally unreadable. Then reached out her hand to pat Marina's arm.

"There, there," she said quietly. "It will be okay."

It wouldn't, though. That was the problem. It would only get worse when she received the entries for District 9, when whatever train wreck was brewing within the fractured group of victors reached its peak, when everything inevitably fell apart.

By design. It was supposed to fall apart. It was supposed to be miserable. It was supposed to cure all of them of any desire to ever mount this kind of undertaking ever again.

Starting, it seemed, with her.

Polly continued to pat her arm for an awkwardly long period of time, and she cleared her throat.

"You've done well so far, I think," she suggested, smiling uncomfortably at Marina, looking as though she would very much prefer staring down one of the death lasers to this kind of emotional moment.

Surprisingly, it was not totally ineffective, though.

She smiled back halfheartedly at Three's only victor.

"What's going to happen to these children… Eight's, and yours, I've given you Nine, I don't know how you're supposed to…"

"I'll look after them as well as I can. You know that, Marina. I said I would, and I do the things I say I will." Polly paused, looking back at her microscope with near-palpable relief. "Well, when I remember."

At least she was upfront about being unreliable, though in a way, it sometimes felt that everyone she cared about was much the same. Truly, what else had she ever expected from the victors? It was unfair, honestly, to ask them to be reliable. They weren't fundamentally reliable people, and if they ever had been, the Games and their aftermath had cured them of that particular personality trait.

While she understood that, of course, it still turned her stomach, because if _she_ failed to be reliable, the initiative to end the Games fell apart, and the world might as well go with it. If she stopped spinning plates, she wouldn't find them safely in her cupboard the next morning. They were all over her head, held there tenuously through centripetal force that she herself exerted. If they fell, they shattered.

But didn't she have as much excuse as any of them to be a mess?

Why couldn't _she_ be a mess, damn it?

Perhaps even more, how was it that of all of them, all the victors and all the people whose lives had been so drastically affected by the Games and the way their structure changed society, changed people, changed them… how the hell was _Claudia_ the only one who seemed totally unaffected by everything? And how was that fair, when she went on to use that put-togetherness, more or less, to torment the rest of them?

"I _will _try," Polly added, apparently concerned by her long silence in response. "Really, I'm, well, in a better place than I sometimes have been with all this. I've been preparing. I…"

"I trust you," she said, which she probably shouldn't, but who else was she supposed to trust right now?

Polly wasn't _not _her friend, after all. At the moment, she felt like the closest friend she had.

Halogen mewed in approval, weaving between her legs in a figure-eight pattern and getting calico fur all over her boots. She sighed, then leaned down to pet the little cat, a sort of peace offering, since usually they were so at odds.

"Take care of your mom," she whispered to the little beast, which gazed at her inscrutably with yellow-green eyes and then tried to bite her hand.

Polly scooped her cat onto her lap, somehow running her hands over Halogen's head in a way that reduced the cat to a puddle of fur, purring like an idling motor.

"She always does," Polly said quietly, with something approximating a smile.

On her way out, Marina found herself swallowing an unpleasant tightness in her throat. The sun was beginning to set. She'd put off returning to her empty apartment long enough. It had never bothered her before, but… was it weak, admitting that it was beginning to? That it hurt, in the most undignified way, knowing that the aloneness was something that could be theoretically remedied, but not in practice?

Who was taking care of _her_?

x

_We are now …. two thirds of the way through the intros! Can I get a hell yeah for intros, a hell yeah for avoiding writing my final papers and lab reports, and an additional hell yeah for the Dunkin Donuts employees who know my order by heart?_

_Also #tbt when my intro chapters were like 2-3k words? I guess at the same time I was doing one character at a time, and the subsections do lean 3-4k + a 1k-ish Capitol bit. Updates will be a lot faster after I pass my cell bio class and #graduate._


End file.
